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Episode: An in depth thesis about Earwigs

Author: Blindboyboatclub
Duration: 00:58:09

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Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Inspect the red brick to ready break you henpecked decklings. Welcome to the blind boy podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

00:00:14 Speaker_01
There's close to 400 episodes now. A lot of new listeners. They actually go back to the start, but there's nearly 400 episodes of hot takes and I've never pulled an episode out of my arse.

00:00:26 Speaker_01
I've approached every single episode with curiosity and passion and I've tried to make the podcast that I would listen to if I wasn't me. I'm going to begin this week's podcast with a poem that was submitted by Hollywood actor Kiefer Sutherland.

00:00:42 Speaker_01
The poem is called The Earwig. I want to be an earwig so I can climb inside your ear. I'm gonna wipe my big earwig's arse on your eardrum with my pincers and my thorax.

00:00:54 Speaker_01
I'm gonna eat chips inside in your ear or whatever it is that earwigs eat, the equivalent of earwig chips. I'm gonna stay inside in your ear for so long that I die. And then you're gonna have to go to the doctor

00:01:09 Speaker_01
complaining of a full feeling in your ear, and the doctor is going to remove my dead body from your ear. The doctor will say, oh wow, an earwig, they really do climb into ears. But it's not an earwig, it's Kiefer Sutherland.

00:01:24 Speaker_01
Thank you Kiefer Sutherland for sending in that piece of poetry, technically more of a piece of prose, or even a short story. Why am I thinking about earwigs this week? Earwigs were a large feature of my childhood.

00:01:40 Speaker_01
Before I'd go to sleep, I'd be genuinely afraid that an earwig would climb into my ear and lay eggs in my brain. And it wasn't like being afraid of monsters under your bed.

00:01:52 Speaker_01
If I was a little kid and I had difficulty sleeping and I'd say to my ma, I'm afraid of an earwig climbing into my ear. She wouldn't say to me, oh, there's no such thing as earwigs. She'd check under my bed to make sure there was no earwigs there.

00:02:08 Speaker_01
And then my dad would tell me about when he was a child, they used to sleep with cotton wool in their ears to prevent earwigs from climbing into their ears. I don't see earwigs anymore.

00:02:21 Speaker_01
I can't tell is it because I'm not looking for them or because of biodiversity collapse. There's a hell of a lot less insects now than there was when I was a child. But seeing an earwig, that would really cause me to recoil.

00:02:38 Speaker_01
They're not very friendly looking. They're frightening, especially because of those big long pincers on their arse. And you'd imagine, my God, what if those pincers were in my ear? They're called earwigs, of course they go into ears.

00:02:54 Speaker_01
It was just accepted by everybody that earwigs climb into your ear and lay eggs inside there. And no one had ever seen it happen, but everybody knew somebody who it had happened to. A bit like someone who's seen a ghost or a UFO.

00:03:12 Speaker_01
I've never seen a UFO or a ghost, but I've met people who've said they have. The closest I ever came to An earwig gone inside someone's ear. I was very, very young. And out my back garden, there was a hedge. There was a hedge out my back garden.

00:03:31 Speaker_01
I was like three. And for some reason we had an old hoover in this hedge. A hoover that should have been thrown out and it just ended up inside the hedge. It was green. I used to actually ride this hoover. Like a toy car.

00:03:47 Speaker_01
I used to straddle the broken hoover. and push it along by its wheels using my feet and for some reason it was being stored in the hedge. I'm talking about a vacuum cleaner if you're American, I don't know if you have hoovers in America. And one day,

00:04:04 Speaker_01
Like a burglar. I don't know what you would even call him, a burglar. A man came into my back garden when I was a child. And my ma looked out the kitchen window and all you saw was half this torso under the hedge. Two legs sticking out.

00:04:19 Speaker_01
With very dirty shoes. A wino, my ma called him affectionately. And I remember seeing his dirty shoes and his dirty legs sticking out of the hedge.

00:04:31 Speaker_01
And my brothers who were older and my ma being quite frightened and shocked at what the fuck is happening out the back garden. Who is this man? And he was trying to steal the broken hoover and the hedge. And my ma went out to him very frightened.

00:04:47 Speaker_01
Asking him to stop. What are you doing? What are you doing? But when she did that He started crying out in pain from inside in the hedge just that this noise coming from the hedge ouch ouch ouch

00:05:04 Speaker_01
I remember the hard consonants from his teeth, rising up, almost with a cork twang. And now the man wasn't stealing the fucking, stealing the hoover anymore.

00:05:15 Speaker_01
He's just this dirty set of legs hanging out of a hedge, talking to my mother, and claiming that an earwig in the hedge is now inside his ear, and biting, and that he's in extreme pain, and he needs help. So then my ma,

00:05:35 Speaker_01
My ma offered to drive him into the hospital in town. Barrington's Hospital. She offered to drive him in there. This stranger who was stealing a hoover out of the hedge. Now my ma has given him a lift to fucking hospital. It was the 80s.

00:05:52 Speaker_01
I suppose that's just how things were. It's a fairly innocent crime. I'm stealing an old hoover out of your hedge. If he'd asked for it, my ma probably would have given it to him.

00:06:03 Speaker_01
But when he started screaming in pain, oh there's an earwig in my ear, he stopped being a robber and instead just became someone in pain.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
So my ma drove him to the hospital and along the way, you know, she was asking him his life story and he said, he said he used to be a successful locksmith and he owned his own locksmith business.

00:06:24 Speaker_01
But then he grew too fond of the drink and found himself in a very bad way where he didn't have a lot of money and he's stealing a hoover out of a hedge. So they get to the hospital and by this time my mother's invested now.

00:06:37 Speaker_01
So it's like, all right, I'm after dropping this man to the hospital. Well, I might as well wait to see if he's okay. So she does. Was there an earwig in his ear? Did the earwig lay eggs in his ear? Is his brain going to be safe? Will he die?

00:06:52 Speaker_01
And then he came out of the hospital and he told my ma, yeah, they found an earwig in my ear. It was in two pieces and they took it out. Thank you so much for helping me. And I remember my Max explaining this to me and my brothers.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
I remember her explaining it to me and then explaining it again to my dad when he got home from work later that day. Because we're all like, Mads driving a wino into town after he tried to rob a hoover out of her hedge. What's going on?

00:07:18 Speaker_01
So she came back and explained the whole story of what had happened. And then my older brother who was about 12. I reckon he was very frightened by the whole situation.

00:07:28 Speaker_01
that night he had a dream which became an anxious recurring dream which he would recite frequently to my ma to my da begging them for an interpretation what does it mean like pure frightened and i'm a i'm a toddler three maybe four just listening to it all trying to make sense of the world he would have this dream that's that

00:07:58 Speaker_01
That Jesus Christ had fallen off the cross, right? He started to have a recurring dream that Jesus Christ had fallen off the cross and was crawling through our hedge out the back garden. to try and pick snooker balls out of the hedge.

00:08:17 Speaker_01
And my brother kept having that dream, after the incident with the man trying to steal the hoover out of the hedge. And then my da, who was fucking nuts. Like, my da was possibly Nora Devergent, I don't know. Lovely man, but deeply eccentric.

00:08:35 Speaker_01
So my older brother's having this recurring frightening dream about Jesus Christ out the back garden picking snooker balls out of the hedge. Instead of saying, oh it's just a dream, don't worry about it. You see, because my dad was at work.

00:08:48 Speaker_01
My dad was at work when the man came to steal the hoover out of the hedge. So he just heard the story about the earwig as well.

00:08:56 Speaker_01
So when my brother would say, I've had this dream that Jesus Christ was crawling through our hedge picking snooker balls out of it, my da would be like, maybe the child has a point. So my da starts to make the argument in front of the whole family.

00:09:11 Speaker_01
What if? The man who had come to steal the hoover out of the hedge was in fact, as promised in the Bible, the return of Jesus Christ in the form of a destitute, untouchable individual.

00:09:26 Speaker_01
And that by trying to steal the hoover, that this was a test to see if somebody would show him compassion and help him. And that my mother, by actually helping him, had passed the test of compassion.

00:09:39 Speaker_01
she didn't condemn him as a criminal she drove him to the hospital and further proof of this thesis is being revealed currently in the dream of a little child to which my ma would reply I shut the fuck up

00:09:56 Speaker_01
because it was not helping my brother's anxiety because he was clearly frightened and traumatized by this man out the back garden looking for a hoover and he was afraid for his mother's safety so he was frightened by this this is why he was having the recurring dream about Christ and the snooker balls like what he doesn't need there is an adult

00:10:15 Speaker_01
going, you could be onto something with that. Yeah, I reckon your nightmare is a correct appraisal of what's happening in reality at the moment.

00:10:24 Speaker_01
And then my dad would, he would quiz my brother and he'd keep asking him, what colour were the snooker balls? What colour are the snooker balls in your dream? And my brother couldn't remember. And my dad would be like, are they white?

00:10:36 Speaker_01
Is it the white ball? Was it the white ball that he was picking out of the hedge? And then my brother's like, Maybe, I don't know. And then my dad's like, are you sure it was a white ball? Or was it a communion wafer? I think it was a communion wafer.

00:10:49 Speaker_01
And then it's like, we had a shitty little snooker table and there were balls missing. I was probably responsible for the missing balls because I'm a toddler and everyone's, you can't play snooker in the house now because there's balls missing.

00:11:02 Speaker_01
It's a cleric called Case. A. He's 12. He's in school. He's making his confirmation. They won't shut the fuck up about Christ in school. B. There was a man out the back garden trying to steal a hoover out of a hedge. C. There's missing snooker balls.

00:11:16 Speaker_01
Case closed. It's not supernatural. Da. And then I'm like 3 or 4 having to listen to it all. So what my da was supposed to do in that situation was say, it's just a dream. It's just a dream. You didn't have an actual religious revelation.

00:11:30 Speaker_01
My dad didn't even believe in religion. Didn't give a fuck about it. I think he just, he liked the connection between the two things and wanted it to be true.

00:11:39 Speaker_01
So I've no idea why he stood with the theory that Christ actually came to our back garden to steal a hoover. I hadn't thought of that story in a long time.

00:11:50 Speaker_01
And I suppose it just popped into my head this week and as an adult, being able to look at it critically, I think I know what happened. I don't think there was any fucking earwig.

00:12:00 Speaker_01
I think that robber, the man in the hedge, he wasn't like a career criminal. If his story about at one point being a locksmith and owning a locksmith shop was true, he was a person at rock bottom who was quite embarrassed about

00:12:16 Speaker_01
stealing an old hoover from a family's hedge and he'd been caught in the middle of a crime. He was caught in the middle of the crime of being on someone's property and trying to steal an old hoover out of their hedge.

00:12:31 Speaker_01
It's not a great crime but it's still illegal and I reckon when my ma caught him

00:12:38 Speaker_01
His way of avoiding responsibility was to pretend in that moment that an earwig had fallen into his ear and he needed immediate medical attention and my ma fell for it and then he went oh fuck now I'm being driven to the hospital and he just had to go along with the lie so that she didn't ring the police.

00:12:57 Speaker_01
I developed an irrational fear of hedges after that incident. I was never comfortable around hedges and Throughout my childhood if I found myself with my head inside a hedge or close to a hedge I'd experience an imaginary phantom pain inside my ears.

00:13:17 Speaker_01
Such was the certainty that an earwig was going to go into my ear and break in two. And why was he stealing an old hoover? People used to repair things back then.

00:13:30 Speaker_01
Like, probably the reason that my mother had the Hoover being stored in the fucking hedge is she probably intended to bring it into a repair shop in town and she would trade the broken Hoover in for money because the repair shop wanted it for parts.

00:13:47 Speaker_01
That's why that man was trying to steal an old broken Hoover. Things were different back then. If your appliances broke down, you didn't throw them away, you got them repaired.

00:13:59 Speaker_01
And you got them repaired locally by just some fella who was handy with a soldering iron and had a repair shop. That's kinda gone. That doesn't really exist. The closest equivalent is a mobile phone repair shop.

00:14:13 Speaker_01
But when you go in with your mobile phone to get it repaired by the local lads in town, You know you're doing something wrong.

00:14:20 Speaker_01
You know that once you make that decision to get your phone repaired cheaply by the lads in the local mobile phone repair shop, your warranty is gone. It wasn't always like that. Like my washing machine broke down about 6 months ago.

00:14:33 Speaker_01
I wasn't able to just get it repaired. It was like a Hyundai or Zanussi or one of those ones. It had to be repaired by an official repair person. And the call out charge was like 200 quid.

00:14:47 Speaker_01
Unless I subscribed to their yearly repair charge of like 100 quid. And then it was 60 quid to call out, which feels like a type of extortion. And then I thought, sure it's nearly cheaper to buy a new fucking washing machine altogether.

00:15:02 Speaker_01
So, repairing household items and earwigs are two things that have disappeared since my childhood. But I don't think, I don't think an earwig got into that man's ear. I think he was bullshitting. Earwigs don't climb into people's ears.

00:15:21 Speaker_01
They certainly don't lay their eggs in people's ears or in people's brains. I mean, sometimes in an isolated incident, an earwig might get into a human ear, but so does a spider or a woodlouse or any other insect.

00:15:37 Speaker_01
So how did we get to this ubiquitous experience where it was perfectly rational as children to be afraid that an earwig was going to climb into our ears and that this would be substantiated by our parents?

00:15:53 Speaker_01
I didn't mean to do a fucking earwig podcast this week. I wanted to do a mental health podcast, but I'm talking about earwigs now. So the word earwig, it's an old Anglo-Saxon word, old English.

00:16:07 Speaker_01
So there's a chance it starts with the Anglo-Saxons, a very paranoid people. The Anglo-Saxons were just these waves of Western European forest people that started to arrive in Britain.

00:16:22 Speaker_01
At the time that the Roman Empire was collapsing, we're talking about the year 400 onwards, 1600 years ago. The Roman Empire was a very advanced civilization for the time. Cities, towns, roads, sewage systems, writing.

00:16:38 Speaker_01
And then it fell apart and a lot of that knowledge was lost over generations. And this happened in the area that is now the island of Britain.

00:16:47 Speaker_01
So you get these waves of people from Northern Europe arriving on the coast of England, seeing the ruins of cities and towns and going what the fuck is this? So they found themselves discovering the ruins

00:17:04 Speaker_01
the old ruins of a much more advanced civilization and not fully being able to comprehend how it was built. But this environment of uncertainty, it bred a type of paranoia into Anglo-Saxon mythology.

00:17:22 Speaker_01
Imagine like, just arriving on a planet and discovering the ruins of a much more advanced civilization. It'd be kind of frightening and humbling. There's an Anglo-Saxon poem that illustrates this. It's from about the year 500.

00:17:35 Speaker_01
And the poem is called The Ruin. And it's, these walls, stones are wondrous. Calamities crumpled them. These city-states crashed. The work of giants corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth. Towers in ruins.

00:17:53 Speaker_01
Ice at the giants has unroofed the barred gates. Sheared. The scarred storm walls have disappeared. The poem is much longer than that. And it's not written in English. It's written in Old English, which you can barely understand.

00:18:08 Speaker_01
But it's an Anglo-Saxon poem. It's a poem about Stumbling across an abandoned Roman town or city could be part of London. And it's clearly abandoned for maybe 100, 200 years.

00:18:24 Speaker_01
And the person who's writing that poem is so astonished and terrified of these ruins that they simply assume they were built by giants, a magical race, because they can't understand the technology. And these people fucking named the earwig.

00:18:41 Speaker_01
Earwig is an old English Anglo-Saxon word. It means ear beetle. This is a beetle that's interested in human ears. The thing is with earwigs, they love dark, damp, shelter, rotting wood, twigs, and they come out at nighttime.

00:19:00 Speaker_01
So one theory as to why the Anglo-Saxons

00:19:04 Speaker_01
began to call these insects earwigs is if you're living in a dark damp hut in England that's made out of sticks and twigs and then you lie down at night time there's going to be a lot of earwigs around you and earwigs aren't very pretty looking they're quite menacing looking and they have those pincers

00:19:25 Speaker_01
And this is old English Anglo-Saxon, so you're talking, like I said, around the year 400 onwards. People didn't understand medicine.

00:19:34 Speaker_01
So one theory is that if you had an ear infection, a headache, mental health issues, depression, schizophrenia, there were all these scary-looking insects crawling around your head at nighttime, and the Anglo-Saxons called them Earwicka, ear beetle.

00:19:54 Speaker_01
So it's assumed that people back then believed that earwigs crawled into your ears, laid their eggs and created all sorts of ailments. So people would start to protect themselves from these ear beetles, these earwigs. And another theory is

00:20:12 Speaker_01
Earwigs actually have wings. You don't see them very often, but earwigs do have wings. And when they're outstretched, they look a little bit like human ears. So the Anglo-Saxons are living in these shitty, dark huts made out of twigs. Earwigs love it.

00:20:29 Speaker_01
They only come out at nighttime. And then when the Anglo-Saxon people are sleeping,

00:20:34 Speaker_01
earwigs are crawling all over him, coupled with the fact that the earwigs themselves don't look very friendly and then they just blame a lot of ailments on him and call them earwigs. And it's a good story, it's a good story.

00:20:47 Speaker_01
Here's this little beetle called an earwig. It's scary looking, it has those pincers, it wants to climb into your ears and lay eggs. My god that's terrible. You mean while I'm asleep and I can't defend myself? Yes, that's what they do.

00:21:02 Speaker_01
Fuck it, plug up my ears before I go to sleep then. So it really survived, through folklore and stories. And as Christianity took a hold in medieval times, the ear was seen as an entry point for demons.

00:21:17 Speaker_01
A lot of mental illness, in particular anything involving psychosis or auditory hallucinations was explained away by a demon whispering into your ear during the night time, or earwigs climbing into your ears.

00:21:33 Speaker_01
It's a wonderful example of a completely unchallenged superstition that we all grew up with. And I think now we're at the end of the earwig era for two reasons. Number one, biodiversity collapse.

00:21:49 Speaker_01
The likelihood of us having an earwig in our bedroom at nighttime, it's a lot less likely. And then the internet. As a child I often wondered, do earwigs really go into your fucking ear? Does that really happen? And my ma would say, yes.

00:22:08 Speaker_01
Do you not remember the man out the back garden with the hoover? The earwig went into his ear and it split open. He had to go to the hospital. And that was used as earwig confirmation in my house growing up. If I wanted to challenge that information.

00:22:22 Speaker_01
The only resource I had was, there was a set of world book encyclopedias from 1979. They were already years old. And the earwig entry was tiny and it made no mention of ears.

00:22:36 Speaker_01
So I would have had to go to the public library, find some botany books, trawl through them and find evidence about whether or not earwigs climbed into people's ears. A huge amount of effort. and it would have taken hours.

00:22:53 Speaker_01
So I didn't and other people didn't and we just continued our lives believing that earwigs climb into our ears and lay eggs inside in our brains. Now what do you do? What do most people do? You ask Google and Google says

00:23:08 Speaker_01
No, earwigs aren't interested in that at all, despite their names. They could potentially go into your ear, but they don't want to do it. They have other stuff going on. I don't know why this has turned into an earwig podcast.

00:23:21 Speaker_01
What I'm marveling at, here's what I'm marveling at. I've traced the roots of the myth of earwigs crawling into your ear to the fucking Anglo-Saxons in England 1600 years ago. It was such a paranoid fear for them that they named these insects earwigs.

00:23:42 Speaker_01
And this superstition has survived and been retold as fact for 1600 years. And we've witnessed the end of it because of biodiversity collapse and the internet. And I find that fascinating and a little bit sad.

00:23:59 Speaker_01
I find it sad because I think it's useful when there's folklore and folk beliefs that give power to nature and biodiversity.

00:24:11 Speaker_01
I've said it a million times, but I reckon that the evolutionary purpose of mythology and folklore in the human animal is to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity. And when you have this little insect called an earwig,

00:24:29 Speaker_01
and there are stories and beliefs that this earwig can burrow into your brain or that this earwig might cause mental illness or an ailment.

00:24:40 Speaker_01
You give that insect power, that insect is now feared and treated with a certain degree of respect via caution. You're not gonna fuck with earwigs.

00:24:51 Speaker_01
You might put cotton buds in your ears, you'd be afraid of them, you don't want them in your bedroom, but you're not gonna fuck with earwigs. Because you might be afraid of revenge.

00:25:01 Speaker_01
And earwigs, they're part of biodiversity, they're part of the ecosystem, they're very important. They're not a keystone species, but... Like what do earwigs do? Earwigs are predators. They eat the insects that eat plants, such as aphids.

00:25:21 Speaker_01
Earwigs eat aphids so they keep the population of aphids in control. Earwigs are also decomposers. Like, okay, what would happen if all the earwigs disappeared tomorrow? Insects that eat plants, that eat crops, their behaviour would be unfettered.

00:25:40 Speaker_01
Their population numbers would be unfettered. So plants and crops that we eat would begin to disappear. Earwigs are also decomposers. Now I spoke about wasps a few weeks back. You know wasps are very important as scavengers. Wasps will eat dead animals.

00:25:59 Speaker_01
Earwigs eat dead organic material. They'll eat dead trees, dead plants, dead leaves. Earwigs will munch away on twigs and sticks and leaves and bark and whatever you want. Break it down to return some nutrients to the soil.

00:26:16 Speaker_01
and then the worms have a go at it, and then microbes have a go at it. But that's essential for soil fertility, for the natural regeneration of soil fertility. Fungus, mushrooms, depends on earwigs breaking down organic matter.

00:26:32 Speaker_01
So now, like earwigs disappear, so now you have soil that's no longer fertile. And the plants that even try to grow from that infertile soil, they're fucked now as well, because they're getting eaten by pests.

00:26:47 Speaker_01
And then food sources get impacted, and now larger animals are dying because they can't get food. Earwigs are very important. Birds will eat them, rats will eat them, mice will eat them, but humans can eradicate them en masse.

00:27:02 Speaker_01
Exterminate them all, just for the crack. Or just by existing as humans. Like why are all the insects disappearing? Why was there way more earwigs around when I was a kid than there is now? Pesticides, destroying habitats, humans just being humans.

00:27:19 Speaker_01
Our ancestors didn't behave that way. They thought that earwigs could climb into your brain and cause you to go mad. And that type of superstition, it breeds a non-interventionist respect. Get them the fuck away from me.

00:27:34 Speaker_01
But if I came across an entire nest of earwigs in the wild, I'm just gonna let it be, just in case. Cause I don't fully understand these things. They sneakily use the subterfuge of night time to get into people's heads.

00:27:49 Speaker_01
And in some cases, demons can arise. So, I'm just gonna leave them be. And that there, that's the benefit. That's the benefit of folklore and superstitions about nature within the human animal.

00:28:01 Speaker_01
That type of paranoid, fearful storytelling about nature keeps us in line with systems of biodiversity.

00:28:08 Speaker_01
And I'm sad to have grown up with earwig superstition and to now live as an adult and earwig superstition is gone and half the earwigs are gone as well. A mythology that's 1600 years old ended in my lifetime. Let's have a brief ocarina pause.

00:28:28 Speaker_01
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00:30:09 Speaker_01
I could never get a decent sound out of this. You would have heard an advert for something right there. This podcast is sponsored by you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

00:30:27 Speaker_01
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00:31:00 Speaker_01
It's a wonderful module based on kindness and soundness. And most importantly, it keeps this podcast fully independent. So that's patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. Let's plug a couple of gigs. What have I got coming up? November.

00:31:18 Speaker_01
I have a gig in Mayo that's sold out. Looking forward to Mayo. Then Vicar Street on the 19th of November. Come along to that. Not a lot of tickets left for that gig. I love my Vicar Street gigs. I believe that one's a Tuesday.

00:31:35 Speaker_01
It's like going to the cinema or going to the theater. I love doing my live podcast in Vicar Street and I can't wait to be back there in fucking November. So get yourself a ticket for that. There's only a few left.

00:31:46 Speaker_01
I don't think I've had any gigs in December. I generally leave December quiet and I tell you why. I'm terrified of office parties, like utterly terrified.

00:31:57 Speaker_01
Like in the past, I think before the pandemic, I'd done one or two live podcasts where a fucking entire office is having their Christmas party at my live podcast. And there might just be one person in that group who likes my podcast.

00:32:13 Speaker_01
and then another 10 people who want to go out and have crack. So a drunk merry Christmas party, office Christmas party, is not what you want at a live podcast. So I tend to just keep December quiet.

00:32:28 Speaker_01
So February 2025, the 9th of February, I'm in Leisureland in Galway. Might get a few people flying over for that. Galway's a handy place for the old tourists. I'm in Dryden in February. I'm in Belfast at the Waterfront Theatre on the 28th of February.

00:32:46 Speaker_01
And then fucking Australia. That's nearly sold out. Australia and New Zealand is, I'm pretty sure it's sold out. Quiet enough, I don't want to go apeshit with the gigs. I don't want to do gigs just for the sake of doing gigs.

00:33:02 Speaker_01
If people are mailing me, begging me to come to a certain place, then I'll go and do a gig there for my podcast listeners that are in that area. So back to the earwigs. Genuinely, this podcast wasn't supposed to be about earwigs at all.

00:33:17 Speaker_01
When I was deciding a few days ago, you know, what is this week's podcast going to be about? I wanted to do a mental health podcast. Explore a bit of psychotherapeutic theory. Speak about emotions. That was my intent.

00:33:31 Speaker_01
Because I'm aware that it's getting colder. It's getting darker. And those are triggers. Those are triggers for me and for a lot of people. So... I like to proactively, proactively check in with my emotions and how I'm feeling and my sense of resilience.

00:33:47 Speaker_01
And when I do that, I like I like to do it here. I like to be publicly vulnerable and honest as a form of journaling here. And I know that's very helpful for you, too. So that was my intention for this week. That's what I was going to do.

00:34:01 Speaker_01
My mind was made up. So how did I end up only talking about earwigs for 30 minutes? I'll let you into my creative process a little bit. It's because of Kiefer Sutherland's poem at the beginning of this podcast.

00:34:16 Speaker_01
At the start of this podcast, I opened with a poem by Kiefer Sutherland about how he wanted to be an earwig that was living in someone's ear and he wanted to die in that person's ear. We're all adults here.

00:34:31 Speaker_01
We all know that when I open a podcast with a poem that's written by a famous celebrity, that it's not really written by a famous celebrity. It's me making the poem up and pretending it's a famous celebrity.

00:34:44 Speaker_01
There are some people who genuinely believe that Kiefer Sutherland or Helen Mirren are actually sending me poems, but most people know I'm just making it up for a bit of crack.

00:34:55 Speaker_01
The reason I sometimes open podcasts with a surreal poem by a celebrity is it's a writing exercise. I do it as a writing exercise, as a form of automatic writing, I suppose you could call it, which is a technique from the surrealists.

00:35:13 Speaker_01
Anyone who creates something will tell you that the biggest hurdle is getting over the fear of the blank page. Every creative project starts off with a blank page.

00:35:23 Speaker_01
If you stare at that blank page and think about what it could be or what it might be, that can be very intimidating, that can be very frightening. And also, that way of thinking, that way of thinking, it's...

00:35:38 Speaker_01
Your creative self doesn't exist in that way of thinking. The best way to get beyond the blank page, instead of writing something good, writing something bad, you just simply start writing. So I write poems. I write poems that have no rules whatsoever.

00:35:56 Speaker_01
I enter a type of trance-like state, where the words that I write have no criticality whatsoever. I'm automatically writing the first thing that comes into my head. And I'm driven by a playful mischievousness.

00:36:12 Speaker_01
And when I do that, my brain enters a state of creative flow. I get to the part of my brain where my unconscious memories are, where my dreams are. I've been doing this for 20 years, so I'm quite practiced at this.

00:36:26 Speaker_01
So I can enter creative flow a hell of a lot quicker than I could have 10 years ago or 15 years ago, we'll say. just through practice.

00:36:35 Speaker_01
So when you hear a surreal poem at the start of this podcast, it's me trying to unlock parts of my unconscious mind, to shift my thinking from closed mode to open mode.

00:36:47 Speaker_01
What I mean by that is, as humans, we spend most of our day with our minds in enclosed mode. Closed mode is, it's very self-conscious, very solution focused, task oriented, I gotta work today, I gotta go to the shop.

00:37:04 Speaker_01
I gotta figure out what my grocery list is gonna be. Oh, I better text that person back. Fuck it, I've got a bill to pay. So we deal with all these things in convergent thinking. We evaluate, we refine, we narrow down.

00:37:19 Speaker_01
Ideas into these actionable steps and we evaluate these steps. This is right. This is wrong. You need to think that way. That's a very useful way of thinking to exist in society, but it's not a very useful way to think when you're being creative.

00:37:36 Speaker_01
So when my mind is in closed mode because I've just paid a bill earlier today And I sit down with my blank of my sheet of blank fucking paper to go right There's a podcast to do and I'm gonna do a podcast about about fucking psychology when I sit down with my blank page and my mind is stuck in closed mode and

00:37:56 Speaker_01
Now it's terrifying. Fuck it's a blank page. These ideas better be good. I wonder what podcast other people would like to hear. I've forgotten how to make podcasts. Oh no, this is frightening. What I need instead is the open mode of thinking.

00:38:12 Speaker_01
The open mode is It's where daydreaming occurs. You know, if you daydream, you're in the open mode of thinking. The open mode of thinking is, it's playful. It's when your brain is at play. It's relaxed. It's about curiosity, exploring. There's no rules.

00:38:29 Speaker_01
There's no rules such as this is good or this is bad. This is right or this is wrong. Your thinking isn't convergent. Like to think convergently, it means to converge. solution-focused, break things down, be efficient.

00:38:45 Speaker_01
Whereas divergent thinking, that's open-ended, anything can happen. But also, divergent thinking, that's not very useful to you in the real world, because I'm autistic. I'll think fucking divergently all day long, not a bother.

00:39:03 Speaker_01
But I can't, I can't pay my electricity bill. I can't go to the steps of paying my electricity bill or visiting the bank if my brain is on a free flow tangent about earwigs. And most of us are like that. Daydreaming at work.

00:39:18 Speaker_01
If you're at work and you spend a lot of time daydreaming, it's a lot of fun, but you'd get in trouble. Same with school. So I use automatic writing. I use.

00:39:29 Speaker_01
I'll begin a podcast sometimes by writing a very surreal poem where I'm not guided by whether the poem is good or bad. Instead I'm chasing a feeling of mischief and humour.

00:39:42 Speaker_01
And that's how I end up with a poem about Kiefer Sutherland wanting to be an earwig that dies in someone's ear. But

00:39:51 Speaker_01
That exercise, because I ended up going into the open mode of thinking, where now I'm Kiefer Sutherland and I want to be an earwig, because I've gotten to my unconscious mind to bring this imagery up, that then triggered more thoughts that I ran with, and then I had that early childhood memory of the man out in my back garden and the earwigs splitting inside his ear.

00:40:17 Speaker_01
I'm accessing a different part of my brain. I'm accessing my unconscious mind where my memories are stored. Where stories come from.

00:40:24 Speaker_01
And I'm remembering... I'm right back there as a child remembering my brother with the fucking dream about Christ and the snooker balls. But at no point in that process am I saying to myself...

00:40:36 Speaker_01
You're supposed to be doing a psychology podcast this week. Stop thinking about earwigs. What the fuck do earwigs have to do with psychology? Stay on point. I don't allow that. I don't allow that. I go with the earwig.

00:40:52 Speaker_01
If my feeling of curiosity is pushing me towards earwigs, then that's where I follow. I know the story is going to be in there. Follow that. Because that's the open mode of thinking. That's divergent thinking. It's open-ended.

00:41:07 Speaker_01
I don't know what's going to happen with this, but usually when I follow that feeling, as opposed to doing what I think I should be doing, that's when I end up with a piece of work that I'm really, really happy with.

00:41:20 Speaker_01
If I'd have forced myself to do the psychology podcast this week, I don't know if I'd have been happy with that piece of work because my heart wouldn't have been in it, even though I thought I wanted to do a psychology podcast.

00:41:31 Speaker_01
No, the earwig popped up and I followed the earwig. And that's why this week's podcast is about earwigs.

00:41:37 Speaker_01
The Kiefer Sutherland poem unlocked my unconscious mind and then revealed deep feelings that I have about the collapse of earwig mythology and what it means for biodiversity collapse.

00:41:49 Speaker_01
But if you're a creative person, if you're a writer, a painter, a fucking musician, whatever it is, practice automatic writing, automatic improvisation. Anything that takes you away from the blank page.

00:42:04 Speaker_01
If you're writing, you start writing for the sake of writing. You just write. You don't have to show it to anybody. Just write and follow a feeling. If it's music, same crack. If it's painting or drawing, just start fucking drawing.

00:42:19 Speaker_01
And don't be thinking about right or don't be thinking about wrong or good or bad. You're searching for a childhood feeling of playfulness that transcends all that. And somewhere within that experience you're going to unlock the feeling of flow.

00:42:33 Speaker_01
And now you're skillfully swimming in your unconscious mind. In the part of your mind that you can really only access when you're dreaming. And you can do it when you're awake skillfully as a creative person. And I'm not pulling that out of my arse.

00:42:48 Speaker_01
That process, it's from the findings of Flow Psychology. Oh, fuck it, the podcast is a bit about psychology, isn't it? It's from Flow Psychology, which I've mentioned many times. There was a psychologist whose name I just can never pronounce.

00:43:03 Speaker_01
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Just look up Flow Psychology. He was a psychologist who dedicated his life to trying to study the condition of flow and how creative people are able to enter flow. Flow state.

00:43:19 Speaker_01
It's a feeling of intense focus and concentration that's simultaneously effortless.

00:43:25 Speaker_01
And I write and make art, not necessarily to create, but to chase that feeling, the process of that feeling, because that's where I find meaning and ultimately happiness.

00:43:37 Speaker_01
So that whole closed mode of thinking and trying to unlock open mode, that's from flow psychology and automatic writing. That's from the surrealists. Andre Breton specifically, I think, started automatic writing, but I could be wrong.

00:43:54 Speaker_01
So that's why this week's podcast is about earwigs. The old Irish word for earwig has nothing to do with ears. An earwig in Old Irish is called a galseog. It just means like an annoying thing.

00:44:10 Speaker_01
I don't know why the ancient Irish considered earwigs to be annoying, but that was the name that they gave them. Annoying thing. Something that makes earwigs unique and beautiful is they care for their young children.

00:44:26 Speaker_01
Insects in general just lay their eggs and then fuck off, but earwig mothers will let their little babies hatch and then they care for their tiny little earwig babies and that's quite unique amongst the insect world.

00:44:42 Speaker_01
Also male earwigs literally have a spare prick. Literally male earwigs have two penises. and one of them is a backup in case the first one breaks. I find that very interesting because a spare prick, that's an Irish phrase, he's a spare prick.

00:45:02 Speaker_01
A spare prick is someone who's annoying, like a third wheel, a spare prick. So I find it interesting that the Irish word galseog means a gnawing little thing, a gnawing thing. It means spare prick and earwigs actually have a spare prick.

00:45:20 Speaker_01
They have two cocks in case one breaks. I don't know why. While I was researching this podcast I went looking for earwig folklore, like Irish folklore about earwigs.

00:45:31 Speaker_01
And the way that I do this is I use the website duchas.ie, d-u-c-h-a-s dot i-e, which is the National Folklore Collection. I've mentioned it many times, but it's this wonderful public resource where, in the 1950s,

00:45:51 Speaker_01
Every school child in Ireland was given the task of going to the old people in their village and recording their stories. And all of this is available online.

00:46:01 Speaker_01
So I'd go to ducas.ie and I'd type in earwig and then all this local folklore and cures and mythology comes up about earwigs. And some of it is fascinating.

00:46:13 Speaker_01
There was a story recorded in Kilkenny sometime around the 1930s from a woman who was in her 70s.

00:46:19 Speaker_01
And they asked her about earwigs, and she said, A farmer was asleep in a field after a hard morning's work, and an earwig got into his ear, unknown to him. And sometime after this, he began to have terrible headaches.

00:46:34 Speaker_01
He tried all the doctors in the country, but they couldn't cure him. He tried all sorts of remedies that he was told, but no good. And he was nearly distracted. He was going around the place asking everybody to cut his head off.

00:46:48 Speaker_01
Begging people, please cut my head off. And one day he was so desperate, he took a hatchet to a neighbor and begged his neighbor, who was his friend, please cut my head off, cut my head off.

00:47:01 Speaker_01
So he put his head down on the chaplain block and his friend raised the hatchet into the air and just when the hatchet was about to come down and the man thought that death was upon him, an earwig started to crawl out of his ear and then suddenly the man's face began to open up.

00:47:20 Speaker_01
And all inside of his head were hundreds and hundreds of earwigs that all crawled out at once and just like that his head went back to normal. And the man never had a headache again for the rest of his life. He was healthy.

00:47:33 Speaker_01
So that there is a local Irish, a piece of Irish folklore about earwigs. There's probably a grain of truth to that story but what's being described there is a man with severe mental health issues.

00:47:47 Speaker_01
He's got a headache, he's convinced there's an earwig in his ear, but also he wants to die. He wants to try and either chop his own head off, or he's begging other people to chop his head off. This is someone who's really struggling.

00:48:00 Speaker_01
But what you see there too, in Ireland, is the earwig being represented as a demon of sorts, or even a fairy. That yes, the earwig got into his ear, and it was causing all this trouble.

00:48:14 Speaker_01
But in order to get the earwigs to leave the man's body, you had to trick it. You needed to make the earwig think that it's host, that the man was about to die. So that's how you get an earwig out of your body.

00:48:26 Speaker_01
You perform a death ritual, you perform a mock execution, and then the earwig will leave. So that tells you about, that's a pishog. That tells you about the fear and respect that the people of Kilkenny had for fucking earwigs a hundred years ago.

00:48:42 Speaker_01
I've found another Irish folktale that mentions an earwig. Now these are folktales, it's not mythology that's thousands of years old, it's the stories of the people, just regular people that lived maybe 100 years ago or 200 years ago and

00:49:03 Speaker_01
These were pishogs, so these people who didn't have, maybe who couldn't write or have access to education, to these people these stories really meant something. These were cautionary tales, pishogs, that would inspire fear and superstition.

00:49:21 Speaker_01
So this story here was told by a man in his 80s and it was recorded in the 1930s. There's another treasure hidden in Mr. Friar's Field at Ard Cairn. It's hidden at the bottom of a well. It's a quarter of a mile from the main road to Boyle.

00:49:40 Speaker_01
But there's an earwig guarding the treasure. And attempts have been made to unearth it, but they all proved fruitless. About 40 years ago, An earwig entered a man's ear in his sleep.

00:49:55 Speaker_01
And the man dreamt of this treasure, and he dreamt of it three nights in succession. And he was shown how to treat the earwig in his ear. Now, the story isn't very well recorded, right?

00:50:08 Speaker_01
So, like, a child would have written this down while listening to an older person, right? But the vibe I'm getting so far is that there's a hidden treasure somewhere in Boyle, up in Roscommon.

00:50:19 Speaker_01
There's a hidden treasure somewhere at the bottom of a well, and it's guarded by an earwig, okay? And one night, an earwig got into a man's ear, and when the earwig was in his ear, it started to tell him how to get to the treasure.

00:50:33 Speaker_01
And the vibe I'm getting is that once this man could rid the earwig from his ear, then the earwig that's guarding the treasure would no longer be there and he could go and dig it up. So the story continues.

00:50:46 Speaker_01
In the morning, he and his companions started to look for the treasure. They weren't long digging when a nun appeared and she was dressed all in white. The nun held up her hand and blood was streaming from it.

00:51:05 Speaker_01
And they kept digging and they didn't mind her. And after a while, they saw a crowd of soldiers coming down the hill. They ran as quickly as they could because they knew that they would be killed. So that's a mad story there. It's got folklore.

00:51:21 Speaker_01
It's got war trauma. There's war trauma inside there. You have to realise, people witnessed genocides. That story's from the 1930s, from an elderly man. He could have heard it from someone older than him. The story could be from the 1700s.

00:51:37 Speaker_01
This could be folklore that comes from people who are navigating the trauma of Oliver Cromwell coming in and massacring, genociding the entire village. They can't write this shit down.

00:51:52 Speaker_01
The trauma lives on, the stories live on, and now you've got this really, really strange horror story. There's treasure buried, it's guarded by an earwig.

00:52:04 Speaker_01
An earwig entered a man's ear, told him how to get rid of the earwig, and then when they went to dig up the treasure, a nun appeared with bloody hands, and then a lot of deadly soldiers came over the hill to kill them.

00:52:17 Speaker_01
It tells us about, that tells us about fear. I mean what that reminds me of as well is the Puck Fair. Like you go down to, I think it's in fucking Kerry, I'm pretty sure it's in Kerry.

00:52:27 Speaker_01
There's a little village in Kerry and once a year they get a goat, it's a tradition, they get a goat.

00:52:34 Speaker_01
and they put a crown on the goat and they hold the goat aloft in the air over the town square and everyone has a party around this goat that's wearing a crown. That's the Puck Fair. It's mad. It's mad, right?

00:52:47 Speaker_01
But one of the stories about how the Puck Fair came about, Puck is a male goat, was when Cromwell, when the Cromwellian armies were invading that town in the 1600s,

00:53:02 Speaker_01
violent death squads that apparently what happened is there were wild goats and the wild goats would never come into town. They'd stay away from people.

00:53:12 Speaker_01
So one day everybody was in town and a wild male goat appeared in the town square and everybody knew if that goat is here then he's afraid of something. The soldiers must be coming.

00:53:24 Speaker_01
So because the goat arrived, everyone in the town fucked off to the woods and they weren't massacred by Cromwell's army.

00:53:32 Speaker_01
And then the people from that every year would have a fair on that date where they would get a male goat and put a crown on its head and worship the goat. Thank you so much for saving our lives and warning us about the Cromwellian soldiers.

00:53:47 Speaker_01
And there's a bang of that off that piece of folklore from Roscommon. What a strange, strange story. See, it's pishogs and superstition. It's not understanding your environment. There's an earwig, and the earwig is guarding the treasure for a reason.

00:54:04 Speaker_01
But the earwig went into your ear, another earwig went into your ear and told you some shit. That's the demon, right?

00:54:12 Speaker_01
If you fuck with the earwig, if you go near that earwig that's guarding the treasure, if you interfere with it by digging with it, then bad things will happen. Soldiers will come, British soldiers will come and massacre your village.

00:54:27 Speaker_01
And within that fanciful story, I hear a great, great sadness, a great sadness of Someone a long time ago who witnessed it. A genocide which was happening all the time in Ireland. Someone who witnessed genocide.

00:54:43 Speaker_01
Trying in some way to make sense of it and not being able to read about it or go to a library or turn on the news. Just a distant memory. of people you love and know being massacred.

00:54:57 Speaker_01
Fuck with the earwig, remove the earwig that's protecting the treasure, and dig it, give in to your desires, and the soldiers will come and massacre you, and none will show up with bloody hands. Think of the power the earwig has in that story.

00:55:12 Speaker_01
Think of the power that nature has in that story.

00:55:15 Speaker_01
permeating it is that, it's that old Irish paganism, that old Irish paganism, which is, the land is a goddess, the land is a goddess, and you treat the land with respect, and you treat the animals with respect, and the insects with respect, or there would be repercussions.

00:55:35 Speaker_01
It's a hard thing to argue for, because I don't want to argue for the return of irrational folk beliefs.

00:55:42 Speaker_01
but a greater fear and respect for insects and for animals would certainly serve us well because the complete dismantling of that belief system through colonialism and it being replaced by this scientific rationalism

00:56:02 Speaker_01
That's an exploitation of the land. That's what's led to the climate catastrophe that we're living through right now. We tend to fear the unknown. Scientists with evidence and data and numbers are able to go

00:56:20 Speaker_01
Here's the bad thing that's happening, and it's gonna get worse, unless you change your behaviour. The climate is collapsing. People don't give a fuck about that. People will figure out a way to call that lies. Instead, we seem to fear the unknown.

00:56:34 Speaker_01
It's the uncertain thing. The what-if. What might happen that chills up our spine. Superstition's been replaced with conspiracy theory.

00:56:44 Speaker_01
And people who don't quote-unquote believe in climate change, rather than believe in the data and evidence of scientists, they would rather believe in a pishog or a myth which says that no, there's no climate change.

00:57:00 Speaker_01
What's actually happened is that a very powerful elite who eat babies are able to control the weather, to create more floods, to create more extreme weather conditions, and they're doing this deliberately to control us all. They prefer that.

00:57:21 Speaker_01
That's a more interesting story than a scientist saying, here's a bunch of evidence. That's all I have time for this week. I'll be back next week. Next week, I'm over in Spain.

00:57:34 Speaker_01
I'm taking a little holiday for myself, as in I'm trying to have something prepared in advance so that when I do go to Spain, that I'm not writing, not preparing a podcast.

00:57:45 Speaker_01
I'm literally just being in Spain, which is something I haven't done in seven years since I started this podcast. Dog bless. Wink at a swan. Genuflect to an earwig. Rub a dog.