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Dec. 12, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:17:56
Andy Kirkpatrick
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Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Delingpole, and I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
Andy Kirkpatrick is... You're quite famous, aren't you, Andy?
You're a famous mountaineer.
Well, I'm Hull's third best climber.
In the world?
No, Hull.
Sorry, I missed that bit.
Hull's third best climber.
Yeah, well, that's a hard sell.
Hull's first, third best climber.
Now, Andy, before we started, you were wearing your special mountaineer's hat, weren't you?
Yeah.
Can I see your special mountaineer's hat again?
It's actually quite cold in this house, so I had my hat on.
Because I wanted to ask you, do you think I'd be a good mountaineer?
because look, I think I have.
Do you reckon this would get me up El Capitan?
If I wore this.
I could, I could, I can see you being like found as a corpse or something on Everest.
Oh, like one of those.
Yes.
I could be one of those corpses frozen into the, into the Eiger.
It's the North face of the Eiger.
I'd be good at that.
I was once having dinner with somebody at some trade show and I started going on about Mallory and Irving and how I was so sick of hearing about his body and everything else and then I suddenly realized this was the guy who actually found his body And, you know, there's a whole, there's a whole industry.
It's worth like billions.
It's like, like Harry Potter, basically, but about dead, dead Victor, you know, not Victoria, but dead old mountaineers.
It's a huge thing.
Sorry, how do you monetize dead mountaineers?
Well, there's like films, there's books, there's academics, people make a career in travelling around the world, like an expert on laces, he'll be talking about Mallory's laces and whether they were tied or untied and it's a really, yeah, it's amazing, you know.
Do you think they did make it to the top or not?
I think a lot of the equipment... like they went through the first world war you know they were in the trenches so they were a lot tougher than a modern climber and the gear was actually... like if you look at... like I live... I can see the Aran Islands from my house.
If you look at an original Aaron sweater, it's not the kind of thing that someone's wearing in, you know, like, you know, Britney Spears or somebody, you know, it's not like it was a really heavy duty piece of clothing, like you could fall down the stairs and you would walk away because it was so thick and heavy duty.
where now when you see like someone... because they had no waterproof so those sailors, they'd be out in the Atlantic in storms and horrible weather just wearing a woolly jumper with no waterproofs so the level of sophistication of like old old-timey clothing You know, when you see someone with, like, a reenactment, you know, wearing, say, like, clothing that someone would have in the First World War.
Yeah.
It's kind of a modern interpretation.
It just looks like it, but it's not actually the same thing, you know.
They'd have, like, lanolin in them.
It's probably banned now by, you know, not have lanolin in clothing, I expect.
Are you familiar with Nigel Caborn?
No, no.
He's a sort of fashion designer.
Actually, I'm doing him a disservice.
He, I think he's from the north, northeast, I think.
Nigel Caborn specializes in recreating the stuff they wore on the 1952 expedition to so-and-so or the expedition to so-and-so.
What he does is, I've got one of his, I've got a jumper that he made.
It looks like a Christmas jumper, but it's very, it's much, much denser.
It's a special kind of wool.
It's much more, it's sort of, Waterproofed and stuff.
He does sort of expedition wear like they would have had in the days before you had Gore-Tex and stuff.
Yeah.
And I have to say, I've never been excited by Gore-Tex.
I mean, I live in the country and when I go out for a walk or whatever and it's pissing down with rain, I'd almost be rather be wearing my my keeper's tweed jacket coat than I would, you know, this sort of fancy modern stuff.
Because it tweed, I mean, breathes, doesn't it?
In the way that that all these kind of designer modern fabrics don't do, even though they're supposed to.
It's much harder to mass produce tweed.
That's a problem where you can actually bang out, you know, fast fashion.
It's like a lot of like nylon, you know, underwear and everything else.
You think it's more sophisticated, but it's just easier to manufacture.
So yeah, like I think a lot, like it's kind of weird that wool is so, like in Ireland people, you know, They just burn the wall because no one wants to buy it.
It actually costs them more money to get the diesel to put on the wall and burn it.
That is so sad.
Then it's the wolf's worth.
So it's crazy, but it is.
Again, this is the thing where we always look at the past and think, oh, those guys in the trenches or those guys in Antarctica like Shackleton, they must have been really tough.
People die of hypothermia.
It's just the same now as it did then.
They have a very sophisticated understanding of clothing and how you would layer it together and you'd have all these women and wives knitting special kind of jumpers that they'd be sending to the front and people which were very like almost like a string vest so they would let the moisture out and it would insulate and so yeah it's the fighting in the first world war must have been horrific but
You know, those guys went on those early expeditions like Shackleton and those guys, Tom Crean, like, you know, the...
they were just like amazingly tough but they also knew how to survive yeah where maybe someone who's like a you know like a banker who goes to Everest you know pays 50 grand to go to Everest he hasn't got you know he might be like I've done quite a lot of guiding where you get people who you know have done a lot of training in a gym you know because they were working in the city or whatever and you know they're multi-millionaire and they've got a personal trainer
And they go up there and the fitness isn't really the same, really.
It's more like if you were a farmer or a builder, that's the kind of fitness you often want, really.
So it's, yeah, being able to do loads of pull-ups doesn't really count when it's, you know, minus 20 or something.
It's a weird, yeah.
But it's always that thing where we always look back at the past and think those people in the past that were stupid or they were ignorant or uneducated, you know, didn't even have mobile phones, you know.
It's a shame, really, to not see how advanced they were.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Do you know what, Annie?
I'm loving this already, because we didn't know what we were going to talk about, did we?
Other than probably mountaineering might creep into it.
And there we were, straight away.
We just like, naturally, which I love.
So, by the way, have you been up Everest?
I didn't do my research.
Well, that's... I'm a climber.
That's walking.
If you have to step over a dead body, it's a walk.
And on Everest, if there's any steep bits, there's always a ladder, which is like DIY.
Yeah, but it is the thing you always get asked if you've ever climbed Everest.
It's probably like asking Lou Reed if he's ever been on top of the Pops or something.
You know, it's probably he did get a number one, I guess.
No, funnily enough, I interviewed Lou Reed and that was very much his approach.
You know, I did ask him a question like that and he just ate me alive.
It was he didn't take any prisoners.
He wasn't going to go to try and be Mr. Nicely Nice, but just because you were the journalist and you were going to write up something about him, he didn't give a toss.
It'll be terrifying.
Maybe that's what you want.
You need to intimidate everybody, the press.
Who's the guy who plays Gladiator?
Thingy.
- Who's the guy who plays Gladiator? - Thingy, Russell Crowe. - Yeah, Russell Crowe, like that kind of approach where you just intimidate everybody.
It's actually quite an effective way to go through life, maybe.
Andy, we'd be totally shit at it.
Because I've seen, I haven't seen the whole thing, but I've seen some of your lectures and you make a very good point, which is that if you want to kind of be taken seriously, You've got to be really serious and you've got to talk slowly and stuff.
And you and I both do this thing where we just come up with we want to take the piss all the time and we talk too fast.
Well, I mean, some of the time I do.
I know you do.
And we just want to want to kind of be the class clown.
And I'm sure this is damaged, damaged our careers to a degree.
It's definitely, you know, you have, if someone asks you to do like a TED Talk, and you're like, oh, this is my big moment, and then say, oh, we'd like you to go through the talk over Skype before you do it, and you're like, I'm not doing that, I can't be, I haven't got time for arsing around doing that, I'll just turn up and do it, and you turn up with no preparation and no, you know, you basically do like a 40 minute talk in 15 minutes, and you come back,
you know and when you see it like on YouTube people are saying this is the worst talk I've ever seen and you know learn to talk, learn to speak properly and you're like oh I just... I once went to the Hay on Wye Book Festival and I just like turned up with... it's not really my scene but I just kind of turned up and I didn't really do any
preparation and I just had all these random slides and you know and I remember like someone was apologizing to someone else in the audience like oh I do apologize for for bringing you to see this this idiot you know because I started reading this because I can't actually read very well right and I thought I had to read something like reading a book for me is terrifying so I you know started trying to read this thing and as I was reading it I was just thinking like oh they're just not going to get this like I should have really worked out what I was going to read I should have talked I can talk okay but
reading like this is boring me and I'm reading it you know so yeah like life as you get older you look back at all these great opportunities you have and you just blow them all and then you just think well there'll be another one, there'll be another one and eventually it gets to the point where you're like you have no friends, you have no money, you have Yeah, nothing, no opportunities.
And you're just like, you're just unreal.
You're just a loose cannon.
We don't want loose cannons on, on deck, basically.
Yes, we're gonna hike you overboard.
And I have to say, I mean, I haven't met that many mountaineers, but I've seen quite a few documentaries.
And The mountaineers I've seen tend to be quite sort of strong, silent types.
They're quite deep and thoughtful and meditative.
Not qualities I'm noticing in you very much at the moment.
So do you kind of... There's only one who's the camera's rolling!
Yeah, I think what's kind of weird is my, when I grew up, when I was growing up, my dad was in the Air Force.
He was a PTI, Physical Training Instructor.
So as a child, we kind of moved around a lot, like we lived in So Sardinia and moved around all these kind of bases.
And then when my parents, my parents split when I was six.
And I think what happened was, because you're always, if you're this kind of military child, and you're always moving around, you're always kind of disconnected.
So you're always like an outsider wherever you go.
And then when I went to school, I grew up in Hull.
I was in Hull.
You know, all your friends were like the outsiders.
They were like the, you know, the black kids and the Asian kids and the refugee kids.
And you're always kind of associating with these, you know, odd people, really, like those strange sheep that you're Yeah, the weird sheep.
It's funny, though, I mean, I don't have at all your background.
And yet what you've described is is something I recognize, too, that I was always with the slightly weird kids or with the I don't know what it is.
I think it's just.
Probably actually, it's what makes us much more interesting.
And it's why you and I are both not buying into this nonsense that's going on in the world in the moment that we just, it's bollocks, don't we?
If you have a private education, like I've done in the past a lot of you know going to schools and talking in schools and you'd have like you go to a private school and you know stay at school and I went to a lot of places where all the kids basically locked in like special units and all this kind of stuff so it's right it's an interesting insight into the whole education system from the very top I know the only one I've went to was Eton because they never paid you.
They said it was an honour for you to go and speak Eton.
And I was like well do you do that with the plumber?
But I always wondered if the private, especially like boarding schools, if they were producing kids who were disconnected.
They weren't like ordinary kids, you know, they were kind of slightly more independently, you know, thinking they could go off and be the opposite class.
Yeah.
Really.
But that was the idea, wasn't it, of the public schools, of the kind of, certainly of the Victorian public schools.
Yeah, send her out to India.
Yeah, exactly.
Around about the sort of mid-19th century, a load of public schools were built.
I mean, mine was, I was at Malvern, which was I think 1865, and they were designed to train the kind of people who went out to run the colonies, run the empire.
And, you know, you might be a district commissioner covering hundreds of thousands of square miles of arid terrain, just you and between you and surrounded by spear wielding warriors.
And it was it was expected that your education would would would fit you for that.
I mean, obviously, there are older schools like Eton, you mentioned, which was founded in what was he called?
Like during the War of the Roses.
But Henry VI, that's it.
How did you go down there, by the way?
Did you, I mean, were the boys appreciative?
Yeah, like I remember one day I did a state primary school in the morning down in London.
Then I did a private school, a primary school about an hour later.
Then I went to Dulwich College and did a talk there.
And then I went and in the evening I talked basically to the masters of the universe This group of, probably the Illuminati ever, in some club in London.
It was such an honour, you didn't get paid, but I thought it'd be interesting to go there and just to see what these people were like.
Well yeah, but it was interesting in that I did the same talk to every single person.
So you're talking to people working in the city and primary school children and you did the same talk to everybody and everyone would take something else out of it.
And yes, I always try to talk to everyone the same.
I can't really be anything but myself anywhere.
I once did a talk at the Royal Geographical Society and I said, oh yeah, this is gaffer tape.
Gaffer tape, it's really important when you're climbing a mountain.
As I call it, rape tape.
And no one had ever said the word rape tape in the Royal Geographical Society before.
But as soon as my brain's like, just don't say that, don't say that, because that's just not a good thing to be saying.
And I just have to, you know, I just had to say it really.
So, but I tried, like the word retard, they always say when I was a kid, I was a retard, like everyone said I was a retard.
I was like a remedial.
I was in every class, which was a remedial class, which in the 80s, that meant, like the first time someone said, are you a rem?
I thought you meant like Rembrandt because I was really good at drawing.
You just meant are you a Rem as in you're a retard and like in the 80s like if you're a remedial child it was like you know it was just like going to Boston or something you just had the you know it was just like controlling all these kids who were like setting fire to you know to the teacher and you know like opening the windows and throwing all the books out the windows and it was just it was just horrific I mean because you're like, it's like being in an insane asylum.
You're like, I'm not mad.
Why have I been put in here with all these people?
Because they're just insane, all of them, you know.
And so it is.
So yes, it's kind of weird to be at Dulwich College.
Like I remember when I was at school, there was a trip, a school trip.
They never had any trips to the school I went to.
It was kind of like Kez's kind of, you know, a whole terrible, like all that's the worst.
Education outcomes of any place in the UK.
And it always has done.
So it was a trip and it was like, it was like some army thing where if you were an officer, if you, you know, to be an officer, you go on this trip and then, you know, you can go in a helicopter or something.
And I went to ask if I could go and the teacher was like, oh, you're not officer class.
You can't go.
And which is kind of sad, really.
And then years later, I end up Yeah like a lot of my work is actually dealing with people in the like officers and the army so you're like you know you're giving you're talking to people about stuff to do with the military you know as so it's kind of it's a life is very strange how you you know you kind of fall through the gaps really so.
Do you find that you get respect from the officer class because you've you've done crazy shit and that even they wouldn't dare do?
a little bit I think like a lot of soldiers I have a lot of friends who were ex-soldiers and they might have like five people who've died you know in combat or in combat training or whatever where I probably know them all up there's probably about 50 people in my life I've been climbing for like 30 years or something yeah and I could probably push it to a hundred
You're dealing in a similar kind of thing which is about death and risk.
But you're not really getting paid to do it either.
You're not being ordered to do it.
You're not being ordered to go to Antarctica and climb a mountain that no one's ever heard of and no one really cares about.
So it's weird.
I'm the stupid one really.
Yeah, I mean, you can be a flippant or self-effacing about it, but what you do when you're up there on one of those bare mountain faces or ice faces.
I imagine you don't spend much time contemplating your mortality.
I imagine it hits you afterwards and you start thinking, oh my God, what did I do then?
I think there's a few, there's a Maybe once I kind of remember thinking, like I took, I once fell off this pitch on a climb, so climbs like broken up into pitches and there was one pitch which was graded that if you fell off you would die, it was so serious and I ended up falling off it and I took like a huge maybe 150 foot fall and I was ripping all the
protection out of the rock and everything else and but I kind of survived and died and I was all by myself and when I came to us when I stopped when I was finally held by a piece of protection I kind of let out this scream and then my brain was like what are you screaming for there's no one here like don't be melodramatic but it was only like maybe like years later when I literally was in the middle of the night and I just woke up and I was just like My God, that was pretty serious.
And so you maybe don't dwell on it too much.
You're always trying to learn.
You're not wanting to die.
I've got three kids and people say, oh, when you had kids, did it make you safer?
And it's like, no, because I didn't want to die.
I didn't want to die before I had kids.
It didn't really make any difference.
I give up the Russian roulette and the heroin.
So could you sort of, as you fell, could you see the sort of, what are they called, pitot?
What are the things you jam into the rocks to stop them?
Yeah, like this thing was so marginal that the protection you had in the rock was actually almost like a fishing wear.
It was just aluminium or like lead and it was just like hammered against the rock like into a crack.
So it was, or into a corner, it was like, you wouldn't even hang a coat on it, it would look so marginal.
And could you see it coming out?
Or were you too busy?
Well, no, I probably had my eyes closed.
Because when you fall, you're so quick that by the time you realise you've fallen, that you've stopped, basically.
You know, it's like, and then you've stopped.
But I was falling for such a long time.
I was like, I was, you know, I was like, I'm falling.
My brain was like, you're falling a long time here.
You know, your brain's like just telling you like, have you noticed, by the way, that you're still falling?
You know, like you're just waiting to stop, but you're not stopping.
And I usually have like the rope, the rope starts stretching and then you start slowing down and you stop.
You fall a long way.
But this was like the rope was stretching.
It was just then pulling the protection out.
And it was a bit like when you pull a post off the wall with the blue tack.
Yeah.
People often say, how many times did you think you were going to die?
And I always say, it's not that, it's how many times I knew I was going to die.
That's how I kind of work it out.
Because there's loads of times when I thought I could die, but there were times when you were like, this is it.
You know, when a huge rock is literally coming coming down towards you and in those moments there isn't this life before your eyes it's kind of you know you pass you know there's this just like a almost like a disappointment if you know what I mean It's like, oh, that's, that's, that's sad.
Like I'm about to, I'm about to die.
There's no kind of like fighting, fighting to live.
It's like, oh, you know, it's like a kind of maybe, um, um, yeah, it's not very poetic.
It's just a bit like, ah, like, oh, that's, that's a booger, you know.
But so, so calm resignation rather than, I think you've also spent your whole life waiting to die in a way.
You know you speak to people who've been in a huge firefight like in Afghanistan or something.
They'll tell you that they basically think I'm already dead.
I'm just going to keep fighting.
As in they know they're going to die.
They're just going to keep fighting until they're dead.
They've almost written themselves off.
Dear Mum, I've just died.
I'm very sorry.
It's a little bit like that.
Hopefully I'm not going to die climbing.
But when I, if I do, it'll be like, my brain will be like, this is it.
This is kind of, this is what you, this is what I should be waiting for.
This is what it feels like or something.
So it's very, it's very morbid to think about it.
Well, yeah, I know.
But let's just milk this theme a little bit longer.
Because because it may not appeal to you but I think lots of people are going yeah give us more give us more um danger porn but but um I imagine it's a fairly generally a fairly quick way to go if you're going to go that way isn't it?
hopefully.
I used to have a girlfriend who was sort of paraplegic and she fell like 10 meters into loads of jagged rocks and basically broke every bone in her body and when you see someone who is so badly damaged and ends up in a wheelchair it does make you think that maybe dying is not so bad.
there are worse things than dying in a way.
like long long term is not so bad maybe you know you can have a completely ordinary normal life if you're a paraplegic yeah but um yeah like it's I don't know it's a if you if you're gonna die it'd be good to just die like so you never see the one that gets you basically that's that's the ideal yeah like with that rock that's gonna land on your head hopefully you wouldn't even know it was it was coming like human beings are amazingly fragile But also they're amazingly tough.
Like a human being can fall a thousand feet down a mountain bouncing off rocks and somehow survive with very few injuries.
Where someone can be changing a light bulb and they fall and land on their head and they're dead.
This is true.
People do dangerous stuff all their lives and then they just... and other people play it safe and they get a brain aneurysm and so it's...
You know, it's yours to play with, I guess.
When your numbers up, your numbers up.
No, I was just just reminded I once interviewed Wes Craven, you know, that the horror movie director.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he was saying he was explaining to me why horror movies have such appeal and why, for example, Freddy Krueger's Nasty claws are so terrifying.
And he says, humans are unlike most animals in the animal kingdom.
We know we haven't got these shells.
We haven't got this carapace.
We haven't got rough skin or anything like that that protects us.
We've got this really, really thin, thin skin.
Which is so easy to penetrate with something jagged, you know, we could die at any moment.
And yet we go around acting, thinking like we're immortal.
And he said, it's it's that it's that sort of paradox that on the one hand, this this feeling of invincibility and almost like we're going to live forever that we have the same time, this knowledge that actually, no, we could die at any moment.
Anyway, that's what.
By the way, do you think I don't do, I'm not nearly as brave as you, I don't do that many dangerous things, but I do have an urge to participate in activities which are not very safe.
You know, I'm thinking of hunting foxes, for example, and I don't know, stuff like that.
I worry about the modern generation.
They don't seem to be interested in doing these things as much as perhaps past generations did, or is that my imagination?
Yeah, I think one reason I quite live in the west of Ireland, one reason I quite like it is it's kind of a little bit more rough, you know, I mean the people are rougher.
Yeah.
And they're more, they're probably more into, they don't, you know, when someone chops down a tree they don't all, you know, start crying and pulling their hair out.
Hugging it.
I was once somewhere, I had a friend of mine, he's a famous wildlife photographer and he's been all over the world.
We're doing this thing and we're in this kind of picnic area in the Peak District and there was all these ducks and this guy came in with a car and he hit one of these ducks and it was kind of semi-crushed on the road and literally like a hundred people gathered around it and people were like wailing and didn't know what to do and you know it was like this and you could ring the police or ring the RSPCA maybe get an air ambulance or something
this guy John just walks over, parts all these people, he picks it up, he just breaks its neck and he takes and just drops it into the into the bin and everyone was just aghast you know like maybe they could have done surgery on it and saved his life but this kind of weird I think it's kind of Disneyfication of everything you know that everything is
You know, it's weird because we have this kind of obsession about things that don't really matter and just completely ignore the stuff that does matter.
You know, you're on the mobile phone weeping about, you know, like refugees, children, like, you know, on the border of Mexico from Haiti, but yet your own child is sitting there Just, you know, the brain is turning to mush just because they never see their parents face.
The parents always just looking at this phone.
Yeah.
So it's this.
Yeah.
So we a weird kind of distraction from the real world, really.
So I think I think I think there's this thing.
I don't know if you've read the book on Kili.
If you're into killing things, it's the book to read.
It's highly recommended.
I can't remember who wrote it now, but it's basically called On Killing.
It's about killing.
What, the Joanna Burke book, or is it no?
No, it's about, it's a guy who was, it's basically on the reading list of all people who kill things for a living, like soldiers and things.
but in the beginning there's a where he is a child and he's at a pig farm and all these pigs are there about to go off to slaughter yeah and they start getting stones and throwing stones at the pigs and the farmer comes out and he like absolutely lays into them and he's like don't you ever you know like and he was like what what does it matter like they're about to go to slaughter like it doesn't matter if we throw stones at them and but it was this thing it was that and it wasn't
you know yes we're going to kill them but we're going to kill with some kind of there's a process and you can't be you know hurting them or torturing them or whatever and I thought I think and I think it's that weird like I think often like people maybe like a hunter and a hunt saboteur have maybe more in common Then they believe it's all the other people in the middle don't really get it.
If you know, I mean, like there's a there's a love of nature that they both share.
They could easily swap positions properly.
Totally.
Yeah.
Now, what I'm totally with that farmer that you mentioned, but you talk about I really don't enjoy killing things.
I mean, if you ask me about the pleasures that I get out of of these kind of things in a shooting or whatever, The actual killing of the animal is the thing I like least.
I really don't.
You know, I love animals and I love it.
It's more the outdoor experience and the kind of the personal danger and the adrenaline and stuff that I kind of wish that the animal didn't have to die.
But at the same time, I think it's the it's the death of the animal that makes the whole experience real, you know, as opposed to kind of.
Yeah, yeah.
But but I suppose in the same way with mountaineering, you know, you don't you're not really in it because you want to die, even though lots of people do die.
But if that were if the prospect of death weren't a possibility, I think it might make the experience less meaningful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's kind of.
Yeah, it's a. I think that what makes it poetic is that there's no real gain to be had.
It's so so pointless, basically.
It's like It's like someone... I guess people maybe sit at home and write amazing songs and learn to play the guitar and never tell anybody about it but it's a kind of an odd thing.
I climbed this route in Antarctica and you come back and it's potentially one of the hardest things in the world to climb but no one's ever heard of it.
It doesn't have any real kudos.
It's called Ulvatarna, the wolf's tooth.
It's like a big You know, big, jagged, thousand meter high piece of rock in Antarctica.
But, you know, I once met Bear Grylls and he was he was like, oh, you've you've climbed the bear's tooth.
And I was like, no, the wolf's tooth.
You've climbed the wolf's tooth.
I was like, what are you talking about?
And he'd heard about it.
But most people haven't.
I now feel really bad about asking you the E question because obviously it's such a hackneyed thing to ask a climber and the wolf's tooth is much weird.
I should have said, and I hear you, you climb the wolf's tooth and then you'd have respected me more Andy.
Well, it was the weird thing about, like, this was a really good lesson in life.
Like, I always used to slag off Bear Grylls.
Yeah.
Because to me, he'd find Everest, you know, and that was all he ever did, basically.
He'd find Everest.
He was in the TAs and, you know, made a... So Bear Grylls is a very good example of someone who, you know, who can monetize an adventure and make... I think the Bear Grylls ink is worth, like, billions.
It's, you know, as a global brand, it's worth...
Huge amount of money but it was just to slag him off and then my wife got these tickets to see him being on RT on the television island.
He was being like a chat show and she loves him.
She loves Bear Grylls.
So she was like oh I've got these tickets to go and see him live.
I was like oh Christ almighty.
So I tweeted like oh guess what I'm going to see Bear Grylls finally after all these years.
And she was at school and the telephone rang.
She's a teacher.
And they were like, oh, Bear Grylls, his team have made us aware that your husband may disrupt this recording and there will be security guards there on the evening and all this stuff.
She's like, no, he's not going to do anything like that.
So we turn up on the evening and we're about to go in to the studio.
Everyone's dressed up.
I'm always like, do not say anything.
Don't do any best behavior.
And they're like, oh, could you come with us?
You two, can you come with us, please?
And I thought he was going to be taking down his corridors and across the studio floor.
I thought he was going to open the fire exit.
And like, there you go.
and anyway this door opened and there were Bear Grylls just Bear Grylls and his manager and you know these awful you know it's like these awful moments you know when you're like gotcha moments like I've spent my whole life slagging this guy off but you know like Bear Grylls his dad was a was an MP like a Tory MP and The first thing he said was like someone called Vanessa.
He's like, Vanessa, I'm so so great to meet you.
Now, that is that is like he doesn't know who Vanessa is.
You know, so he gives Vanessa a hug and Vanessa is so happy.
And then he turns to me.
He's like, oh, Andy, I'm a huge fan of yours.
And he basically killed me with just kindness.
Like, how can I ever be horrible?
It was nice of my wife.
And he was.
But then I was like, you know, when you if you've ever met Hitler, you'd be like, ha ha ha.
Oh, Mr. Hitler, people don't like you, but I actually do quite like you.
You'd be like sucking up to whoever is this celebrity.
So I was like, don't don't do that.
Don't be the person who's like, actually, I really love your stuff, Mr. Grylls.
I was like, I said, no, you do realize that I once tweeted that every time I slag you off, I always lose Twitter followers.
But as a result, the IQ of my followers always goes up.
And he was like, yes, we did.
We did see that.
but it was just a really good and ever since then I've never really been able to be horrible to him because I just you know it's a you know it's because in a way those kind of celebrity people like I have I have if I had better hair I could probably have been a celebrity yeah like I once A client with Alex Jones did for this one, the one show, not one show, it was Sports Relief or something.
Oh that Alex Jones, not the other one, yeah okay.
Not the other one.
So we raised like three million pounds.
Remember when Alex Jones, she spent like three days on this rock face.
It was a few years ago, 2014 or something.
Anyway so it was, so I remember Alex, the Alex, not the Alex Jones, saying to me like oh you'd be good on a panel show and I was like Christ Almighty, is my whole life
I've been coming to this moment where I'm on a panel show but I think I don't know if you found this yourself when you when you hang around with celebrities like it's the most awful thing to be is that they're just sort of clinging on you know they know that the ground is moving underneath them and they're being replaced by someone and you know Jamie Thixton is gonna you know it's like it's just a horrible you know horrible thing to be a celebrity I think.
I'm totally with you.
I'm really, really glad I'm not a celebrity.
And also, yeah, I mean, comics particularly are really about as unfunny as you could ever meet in real life, aren't they?
You keep expecting them to make you laugh.
I once, I did a thing where it was a festival and I had to go, I won't say his name, but I went up on this, I went climbing with this well-known comic for the weekend and then we had to do like a talk, you know, the festival about his adventures or whatever and I remember he came to a talk of mine while we were out
for the weekend because I had to give a talk at like a climbing wall or something and it was you know it was very very funny what I was saying and afterwards he was giving me these points like oh when people laugh you should you should stop talking you should let them laugh and you should allow people to blah blah blah and I was like I'm not meant to be funny like I'm not I'm not intending to be a comedian I'm just telling the story and but it is a yeah it's a very like some people get to us A level of celebrity, you know, your Tom Hanks or whatever.
And they're there forever.
You know, they're like they're chiseled in.
But but most people aren't.
And I think that like I had I worked on like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you know, the film with not the original one, the one with John Depp.
And I was like a safety, yeah I was like a safety person.
So for like two months I was in the Chocolate River for two months.
It was a bizarre, bizarre experience.
And because that's the thing, if you live in like a risk, a risk-averse world, that's where you get work.
Because if there's any risk involved, you have to get someone to come in.
And it's mainly to, mainly to blame you if something, if anybody dies or whatever.
You're like, oh well we paid this guy and he Someone, you know, broke the fingernail, we'll sue them or something.
So, but when you see someone like Johnny Depp close up, you know, his life is, it's not a life anybody really would want to have, I don't think.
Yeah, it's just, it's just horrible.
And you're trapped in it, really.
Did you, did you talk to him?
I didn't even talk to him.
Probably not.
There's a real hierarchy.
I remember I once had to say that they couldn't do a scene because it's too dangerous.
They wanted this fat kid who plays Augustus Gloop to go running down through his candy cane forest or something.
And I just said it was too dangerous what they wanted him to do because he could have hurt himself.
So I had to directly say this to Tim Burton.
and you know it's like the you never speak to the director and it was uh but um but it is it is like it is a weird you know because a lot of a lot of things you're trying to get people there there's not not many things are dangerous on the foot on a film set but there are things that are very very dangerous well no there's a real kind of weird on the film set in which case it's very dangerous
there's that weird thing like on a film set it's so unionized that if someone was on fire and you grabbed a fire extinguisher and put them out the fireman would be like that's my job you know he'll be soaring along and that's my job so it's a weird... it's like a train you can't stop it you know so much money on a film That you really, uh, if you're the one who says like, oh, this is actually, I think this gun might be loaded, just be, uh, let's take some precautions.
They'd be like, right, sack that guy.
He's a, he's a logjam, you know.
But, but did you, I imagine they pay good money for that job.
I think I made probably more money in two months than it took me two years to make or something.
But it's really boring work.
Because you're on a film set, you have this lighting.
You put a switch on and the lighting is exactly the same.
You know, day or night, you know, it's exactly the same luminescence and everything else.
So after two months of it, you'd be sitting there and you'd be like, have I just got here or am I just about to go home?
Like you just you lost all sense of time.
And in the end, it was when they filmed the Oompa Loompa singing this singing the song and it was just this this repetitive like oh bum bum bum bum and just like again and again and again for like a month of this oh this guy the umpa lumpa trying to do this dance and you know like loads of people.
I worked with loads of other people and literally they just couldn't handle it.
It was like this is driving me insane like the The nature of, like, you're getting paid pretty well, but it's just, it's not worth it.
Can I just say, what on earth do you know about set?
I can't imagine anyone less qualified to be the safety advisor on the movie set than somebody who does stupid bloody things like you do.
Well, what it was, was that some friends of friends of mine in the James Bond film where the racing through the ice bags.
Oh, yeah, that one.
It was in GoldenEye.
Anyway, so so they did the safety on that film in that they had to go down into the ice and see, I think the ice was.
And then when they did the, and they had to set up, you know, put ice screws into the ice and they put explosives, they ended up doing lots of different things.
So when they built this like Chocolate River, you know, set, which is on the 007 soundstage, it was like humongous.
They're like, who do you get to do safety on something like this?
And they were like, well, those guys in Iceland, they were They were pretty handy at doing anything, so we'll just ask those.
One guy I was working with was probably the best rock climber in the world, and another one had just climbed Everest.
You're there in the Chocolate River, sometimes wading through the Chocolate River with your With your waders on, so it was very surreal.
When you stepped in and said the scene was too dangerous for Augustus Gloop, I mean, that must have been out of character as well.
Surely your instinct is, yeah, it'll be fine, it'll be fine.
Did you suddenly feel that you had to earn your money by interjecting something vaguely safety conscious or what?
I think because I've got like kids of my own, so you're kind of thinking like there is a kind of risk of this.
You have to like basically run very quickly down to the river, the chocolate river, and you're supposed to be drinking the chocolate.
Yeah.
And I don't know, it's just like you actually might hurt yourself here.
So I just thought I'd better just mention it but once I mentioned it then it was it was it was like logged to like oh someone mentioned something here like we could be sued if anything happens because he said it so I think they just got the stunt guy just got like a pad he just like You know, just wait till they grabbed him if he fell, if he fell the wrong way or something.
But it was, there was like these huge big like drop off, drop offs into the chocolate.
The chocolate was about two and a half, about three feet deep.
So you could fall like 50 feet into the chocolate and you'd, you'd, you'd drown in it.
So it was, you know, it was very, it was very, very fun.
But it was kind of, you know, it was, there was kind of all sorts of hazards.
It's like, it's like being in a factory, really.
It looks, It's like the real Chocolate River Factory.
The real Charlie and Chocolate Factory really.
It looks like a fun place.
Because they built the whole thing.
It was real.
Not with real chocolate was it?
It was basically like washing up liquid.
And it went basically off.
So it was, you know, it was like a BIOS free zone to begin with.
So you weren't allowed to like, you know, like if anybody dropped a sandwich in it or something, they had to come and scoop it out.
But slowly it got more and more contaminated and it just was awful.
The smell, it was terrible.
If ever I watch that film again, which I probably won't, but if I did, I'm going to look at it now and thinking, that's not chocolate.
That's nasty stuff that goes rotten and I'll feel repelled by it.
So thanks for that, planting that idea in my head.
I'm slightly worried that I haven't asked you more sort of mountaineering questions, but you mentioned in some of our email exchanges that one of the areas that you really piss off your fellow mountaineers is that you're not sufficiently woke on environmental matters and things.
Why do they, why do they have to do that?
Why do they, why are they like that?
Well I think, I think there's one difference, like I never went to university, so I've never really been, I've never been like fully programmed in a way.
Yeah.
So I think, I think it's the ability, like I remember when I skied across Greenland And it's like 500 kilometers or something, and it's like 27 days.
It's very, very boring, just like skiing along.
And on the days when there was no planes flying over, It was always really, really, really, really, really hot.
Even though the air temperature is like minus 20, it was actually very hot because of the sun.
But every other day, the planes would start flying over to transatlantic flights.
So the, what do you call it?
The chemtrails.
They were like spread out over the sky.
And it was like really baltically cold on those days.
Like significantly, you know, you'd have to start wearing a lot more clothes on those days.
So when I, you know, when you, when you come back, you would, you would, maybe I'd write something somewhere like about, you know, this experience and the, you know, on the day after the 11th, like the temperature of America, you know, increased by one degree or something because of the, there was no planes flying.
So, you know, you would, you would just ask a question, like if there's, you know, when, You know, this thing about you knew that we're going to try and get rid of diesel cars because you saw them seeding these things in newspapers, you know, from 10 years ago, like about, you know, the pollution was so bad and the air quality and the micro.
All this kind of stuff.
And I remember saying, like, this is just seeding, foreshadowing, we're going to get rid of diesel cars or petrol cars.
So you would say that, oh, well, growing up in the 70s and the 80s, like everything was so dirty, you know, you'd come in, you'd come in and everything would be dirty, all your clothes and everything else, you know, houses were dirty.
The bus would be dirty, everything was dirty because there was so much pollution in the air from all the cars, everything else, that if this pollution was decreasing, which is undeniable, that's what happened, then the temperature, especially of cities and urban areas, would be increasing significantly.
And if these monitors are You know, looking at the temperature, and they're all based primarily in cities or airports around the world.
Like, could this have an effect on our understanding of the global temperature?
But you're not saying it like, you're not saying it like, you're just saying it like a naive idiot.
Like, oh, this is an interesting observation, you know, from my experience of being to Greenland.
But people would just be like, just by asking the question, You know, people will be like, you are a climate denier and you're, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And they're often I think the reaction, the reaction to that, those kind of questions is almost like it's like a red rag to a bull really.
It's like, you know, I'm just I'm only asking a question.
Like, I'm not qualified to give you an answer.
You know, I'm not qualified to To give you an answer, but I can I can ask a question.
So.
So, yeah, so it's and I think that I found out with like there was there's been this big thing about how.
The outdoors is racist, basically, you know, like the whole outdoor community, you know, the mountain bikers, kayakers, you know, anyone, ramblers, bad watchers, you know, CrossFit people.
Basically, everyone is is racist.
in the outdoors and that's why there's not many minorities or whatever in the outdoors.
So I kind of, I wrote an article, I wrote like a long piece refuting this charge on behalf of everybody else, my community, who I've grown up with all my life and know that the most like liberal, pathetic People you're ever going to meet, you know, they would just sleep with my wife, you know, they do anything, have my house, you know, that's not the people.
They've got lots of things that they're terrible about, but not that.
And I wrote this thing and I just thought, oh, this will be easy.
I'll just give it to the British Mountaineering Council and they'll put it on their website and maybe publish it or I'll give it to the You know, the number one climbing websites in the world.
That might be interesting.
Look, I'm defending you guys.
I'm showing that you're not racist assholes.
And, um, zilch.
Not only zilch, but like I was, I was branded being racist because, you know, and it's, you know, like I grew up, I grew up.
It's a classic thing.
Like, oh, most of my friends, most of my friends are black, you know, but I grew up.
refugees and odd, you know, like Nigerians and Lebanese people and all this kind of stuff.
I've lived in Peckham.
I've spent a lot of time in Africa.
So it's just really, it's kind of just annoying in that your character, you spend your whole life You know, trying to be a service to your tribe, basically, outlaw tribe.
And then you're trying to defend them, but they don't want to be defended.
They want to erase this idea that they're, you know, they're just racist, basically.
And it's just the language.
How do you think it happens?
Because, OK, so you're talking about people who spend their time doing dangerous, arduous things miles away from anywhere.
So they're not being scrutinized by the general public.
They're really under no obligation to speak this complete horseshit.
And yet they do.
Is it because the sort of the mountaineering organizations inevitably get infiltrated by woke people and it kind of infects everyone else like an invasion of the body snatchers or what?
Well, we live in a racketeering world, basically.
Like, everything is corrupted.
So the British and American Hearing Council are getting funding from the Sports Council and they would demand a certain degree of, you know, and that seeps into everything.
They'll employ someone and their job is You know, I used to get more minorities, you know, and I've been I've been I was recently in the UK touring around the UK.
I was like on the stage talking about my stuff and I was driving through the Peak District and there was literally like maybe about 20 Somali women, you know, maybe middle aged women.
With two, like, mountain guides, basically, just walking along the road.
And the mountain guides are all dressed in their, you know, mountain guide kind of outfits.
And these Somali women were all just dressed like Somali women.
And I was like, why is this funding being given to these two people?
To take, to basically bust these people from Sheffield to walk along the road and say, look, here is the outdoors.
Please, you know, you'll make us feel so much better if you start coming out here.
When money should be going to like the school in Sheffield, where you've got a, you know, mixed, you know, multicultural kids who really they're the people you should be taking to the outdoors and maybe, you know, 1% of them will think, oh, this is kind of good.
But it's this kind of very middle class.
Like I was in New Zealand, you know, you're in this, you know, Queenstown.
It's like, you know, it's like being in some futuristic, you know, you know, town and it's like beautiful.
Everyone's fit and everyone's happy.
And we're sitting there and it's like mountains there.
And the woman, completely lovely woman was sitting there and she's like, the only problem with it is, you know, there's there's no diversity.
It's kind of like what the fuck are you talking about?
Give people some credit.
Have you ever actually talked to someone who is black or Asian?
I used to live in, I lived in Kuwait for a while.
And every day I would walk along the front of where the water is, where the US Navy SEALs probably popped out.
And there'd be all these Indians and Bangladeshis all playing cricket.
And I said, like, if I went home and wrote this big diatribe about how racist they were and how they made me feel not like one of them, No one ever said to me, oh, you come over here.
Do you want to play cricket with us?
But it's not like life's not like that.
Like it's a mountain that you can you can go out there, go walking if you want.
You know, it's like even in the government.
published material about this diversity in the outdoors.
It was, you know, they took some minorities out to the outdoors and they said how they were made to feel very unwelcome and people looked at them like, you know, what are you doing here?
But if you ever go up on a mountain, there's loads of Indian, you know, like Indian people like mountain, like walking and this kind of stuff.
And there's, you know, so there is Admittedly, there's not many black people walking or climbing in the mountains, but they're probably doing something else.
They're probably into football or something else.
And there's not many working class people either.
So it's that there's a class thing.
It's just not what people... they're basically throwing money at something that's not the problem.
You don't want to be getting more people going into the mountains or into the countryside.
That's why it's the countryside.
It's like, let's get everyone who lives in urban centres to go and live You know, live in the Lake District.
That's not what you want, really.
No, it's not.
It's totally not.
And yet you can't say this unless you've got a kind of career death wish like you have.
but you hope in the end that people will snap out of it if you know what I mean?
like I always have this joke like in Ireland.
like Ireland is basically... everyone is... it's not multicultural.
it's not multi-racial but it is multicultural.
there's lots of You know, Poles and Latvians.
And there's a slight increase in people coming from Africa now to Ireland.
So you'll have this thing in the media where they'll be like, Ireland is a racist country.
And they'll say like, oh, this happens to someone from Nigeria saying, you know, like, oh, I was walking down the street and in the dark and some Irish guy stopped me and said like, oh, I couldn't see you because you're black.
And then they'll have Someone whose parents are Nigerian, but they're born in Dublin, saying, oh, people always say to me, where are you from?
And I'm from and I say, I'm from Dublin.
And so I have this joke where I say that wherever you go in the world, everyone asks you where you're from, where you're from, like literally ask a million times where you're from.
It's not racist.
It's like a human thing.
So I always have this joke that when I was in Kenya, if everyone ever asked me where I was from, I'd always say, I was born here.
But no one ever got it.
And the same as if you're driving in Africa in the dark, it's actually quite hard to see people have dark skin.
Like, it's not being racist.
It's actually a manifestation of human kindness of saying, oh, be really careful in the dark on these Irish roads.
There's no streetlights.
I could have knocked you over.
Like here, where I am, you have to walk around with a high vis on at night because there's no streetlights.
So it's just a lot of these things are a manifestation of a human thing that's that's being twisted into something that's toxic or negative.
Like when I was in Namibia and my wife's got really crazy hair and this little girl was like was was wanting to hold touch your hair.
And I for a joke, I was like, oh, you shouldn't do that.
That's racist.
You know, I'll just I'll just tell you a little, you know, Namibian girl, that's racist to touch someone's hair.
And then I was in this hot tub.
I was in the hot tub in America somewhere.
There was a black woman in the hot tub with me, like in the desert, like a natural spring.
And she had like And I was telling her this story about being in Namibia and the hair and she was like, oh, well, my sister's got really curly hair and people often want to touch it.
And I think it's racist.
And I said, well, I've got a friend who's Norwegian who's got red hair that's like an Afro and people always come and touch his hair.
And I don't think that's racist.
And that's because people are just naturally drawn to want to touch something.
And this woman's eyes, you could see like Her brain was trying to comprehend what I was saying, but she couldn't do it.
And I was like, it's kind of really sad.
You'd stolen her identity, which is basically a victimhood.
The thing that she had, the one thing going for her in her otherwise tedious life was this idea that people touching her hair were racist or demeaning her.
And you took that away from her.
So that's very unfair of you.
I think maybe all these things is like the, you know, the emperor has no clothes is that you, you know, you're undermining like the dogma.
I am totally 100% about ecology and protecting the environment and all these kind of things.
I want the world to be better, but I can see in my own life how much the world has improved.
I'm sure there's a place in the Amazon where the trees are getting chopped down or whatever, but I think in the UK especially, the environment, the inequality in the Arab environment has improved and there's a lot more There's been massive strides being made.
The famous Doug Scott who died recently, he was the first proper British person to climb Everest.
He was famous for just talking and talking and talking and he used to just unplug his slide machine and then he would just stop talking and walk off the stage so maybe this is a Maybe Wi-Fi is a good time to stop talking.
Just explain that one to me.
They unplugged his slides because he wouldn't stop.
Yeah, they just keep talking and then they'd be like, you know, he once gave a talk and he was talking, he was talking about the number seven and he was like, oh, number seven, seven summits, the seven brides for seven sisters, the, you know, the sign of the seven, the sign of seven.
And someone shouted, seven minutes till closing time.
And they just, everyone just like got up and just left the theatre.
Was he a good mountaineer?
yeah he died last year of brain cancer but he was an amazing character.
he was kind of like John Lennon before John Lennon.
he looked like John Lennon and I think John Lennon maybe based himself on Doug Scott.
that's a classic story.
okay okay.
yeah like the round glasses and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah no I mean the only reason I'm asking is is because when I was at school there was a there was a boy um in my year who was completely obsessed with mountaineering and he and he had all these posters and things you know he'd been to all these talks with people like Doug Scott and Reinhold Messner and stuff and all the people of of that day who were who were big things and Chris Bonington I don't know
Who is the all-time greatest mountaineer of Britain?
Edward Wimper?
For your time-lapse.
It's hard to say.
Yeah, Doug Scott is probably one.
In terms of mountaineering, he was a survivor, basically.
He survived to an old enough age to die of something that wasn't to do with mountains.
That's quite unusual, isn't it?
Whole generations of climbers.
Yeah, and Chris Bonnington is another amazing survivor, you know, that he's still survived.
So, yeah.
I mean, I'm right in thinking it is a remarkable thing to live to old age if you do what you do.
Unless you stop doing it, if you just keep doing it, it's a bit like base jumping.
Base jumping is that no one ever gets injured base jumping.
And every base jumper is taught by an older base jumper, a more experienced base jumper.
And generally, they've all died.
All the mentors all die base jumping.
So you either give up because you see someone die and you don't want to die like that, Or you, you know, you all, you know, you, you just, you see sense that it's like playing Russian roulette, you know, you're, you know, you might have, you might have a thousand chambers in your gun, but eventually you're gonna, you're gonna get the bullet really, so.
So do you look at, do you look at base jumpers and think, and think, you crazy, crazy sods, I'd never do that.
A little bit.
I've done some things with base jumpers where, you know, base jumpers want to get to the top of the mountain.
Yeah.
So you go up there with the mountain.
But basically, it's actually quite simple.
It is not a complex thing.
You just have to, when your parachute opens, you just have to make sure you're facing the right way.
Like if you're facing towards the rock, you're just going to smash into it.
Yeah.
You have to do like 600 jumps, ideally, before you jump off a mountain.
So if you don't put the time in, then that's why it's dangerous.
Right, right.
So it's like anything.
It's like shooting a gun.
I mean, if you never fired a gun, it's actually quite dangerous.
Yeah.
But when you fire a gun like a million times...
But then if you fire the gun too many times, you get a bit too slack with it, and that's when you shoot yourself, I guess.
Yeah.
No, I'm with you.
But look, Andy, I've totally enjoyed having you, doing a podcast with you.
It's been absolutely brilliant.
I feel like we could talk for hours and hours and hours.
I've got to go quite soon, but I wanted to ask you before we go.
Ireland, I mean, you're in the West of Ireland.
We're looking at you lot from From England and maybe we'll go that way soon.
But we're looking at like, it's crazy over there.
You know, your restrictions and stuff are just like mad.
How are you finding it or can you get around it?
Yeah.
Like it's kind of difficult, like I'm not I'm not vaccinated.
Yeah.
And for various reasons, like basically.
You're not stupid, basically.
Basically, after two years, I don't know anyone who died of COVID, but I know five people who died of lockdown.
And at least... How did they die of lockdown?
Suicide?
They died of like a lack of cancer treatment.
Basically, just died, literally just died of despair, just kind of, you know, like my wife had a baby during lockdown.
And I would say, like, her treatment was kind of inhumane.
Like, what happened to her?
So I think my trust in anybody or anyone now is at zero, basically.
So what happened to her that was inhumane?
It was just... So I've got three kids, you know, so my other kids were born, like, kind of normally, but you just...
You have this thing again in the UK where you have to mention the health service.
You have to frustrate yourself.
I know people who work in the NHS and that kind of thing, but in my experience, I've always felt it's more like an avatar worker, my interactions.
And I think because I think growing up, If you grew up in a block of flats, and you've been on the dole, and you've been on housing benefit, and you've grown up in that kind of sub-working class world, which is now kind of quite common, is you have no trust for the system whatsoever.
It's not like you're in the system, and it's looking after you, and you're like, oh, I think it's great.
Like I said, it's not this kind of paternalistic relationship.
It's, it's something very, very dark.
So, so when you had the, you know, the tower block that bent down in London, What's it called anyway?
You know what I'm talking about.
Grenfell Tower.
Again, this is one of these things where I'm speaking my mind.
Like I was saying, if you ever grew up in the tower block, if someone told you to just shelter in place, you're a fucking idiot, basically.
Like our house bent down recently.
We had a house that got bent down and basically The tenants set fire to the curtains.
In the olden days, if you set fire to the curtains, you'd whip them down.
When you're a kid, you set fire to the curtains because you're doing something with a candle.
You'd whip them down.
You'd hide them underneath the settee or something.
Your mother would be like, where's my curtains gone?
Well, now we have this kind of mentality of like, the curtains are on fire.
Close the door.
Withdraw from the house.
Ring up the fire brigade.
When they turn up half an hour later, your house is burnt down.
You know, and so that, you know, Grenfell is that, you know, a dishwasher was on fire and the person withdrew from the, you know, call the fire brigade.
Everyone's told to shelter in place.
Now, if you, you know, if you've ever lived in a block of flats, You just get the hell out of that.
I mean, and there's that weird, you know, like when the ship's going down, you know, you have to find you have to make your own arrangements.
Yeah.
You know, you know, you're not you're not waiting in the foyer for the for the person who's qualified to lead you to the to the to your to your rescue to arrive because they probably won't probably won't come.
So so I think my my relationship with with all these institutions is basically damaged from, you know, from childhood basically.
So I don't really, like I have more vaccinations than almost anyone you'd ever meet.
I have rabies, I have yellow fever, I have You know, I have every vaccine going under the sun, but with this one, you know, like I think I actually had COVID in 1990, before COVID was around, like I went to a film festival in Poland.
And it was just after the Wuhan Olympic Games.
You know, they had this military Olympic Games in Wuhan.
Yeah.
And basically where this film festival was downstairs, there was like hundreds, if not thousands of Polish soldiers that some event was going on, something.
And at this film festival, I was only there for three days.
And on the second day, I just woke up with this pain in my head, like in my scalp.
I thought that's kind of really weird.
And then I was just ill.
Got really, really ill.
Like, flu-like symptoms.
And everyone, maybe a third of the people at this film festival, all got ill within a day or two.
And it was just kind of... You don't really think about these things.
You're like, that's kind of weird that everyone just got ill so quickly.
And then I came back to UK.
My wife got ill.
My mother got ill.
You know, like basically everyone who I met got ill for that, within about a week of me getting ill.
And then afterwards, I went back to QA and I started having weird, you know, the long COVID.
I had like, I've had like weird, sort of weird sensations in my calf muscles, almost like, you know, spasms in my calf muscles.
So it was only when, it was only when the COVID thing started, Started, that I kind of started thinking like, oh, maybe that was, maybe that was the COVID thing.
But I remember saying at the very beginning that this will all come down to, I have like a podcast, and I was saying on the podcast, this will all come down to bureaucratic cowardice and incompetence.
And two years down the line, I am even more sure that's what's gonna, like, I listen to you talk to Dick, the saying about having like a trial, you know, having like the, You know, putting people on trial for how they've been.
But if anything tells about in history, like these people are very easily to change sides.
You know, how many people who are in the East German, you know, state just flipped over into, you know, the German state.
Oh, totally.
Ceaușescu, you know, the Romanian communist leader, was basically assassinated by his own side and then they became the new regime.
That's how it works.
Yeah.
But I think it's like it's not like when I was when I was a kid, I remember my mother, my mother, she someone wanted to do something illegal.
She wanted to do something, something to do, some scam to do with housing benefit or something.
She said, I won't, I won't do it.
It's against my principles.
And the, the person said, like Sue, you're, you're too poor to have principles.
And she said, like, no one's that poor.
And that, that kind of, that, that is one of those things in my, in my mind, like when my, when, when Moseley came to Hull in 1936, My granddad sort of went to the to the rail yard where he had this big meeting.
And there's this huge riot, this famous riot in Hull where Mosley and all the black shirts got kind of beaten up by these Hull dockers and all this kind of stuff.
My granddad was a communist.
So if it was Stalin standing on the train, you would have thought that was great.
But, you know, you have these things in your kind of your DNA, don't you really?
And it's not about You know, and it's all, it's more about how you, like if you, like I had to learn to write from scratch, basically.
So like, so language and words and things mean, they almost have like a religious significance to them.
Like to learn to write, I would literally look at a page of writing and try and work out how big paragraphs should be and, you know, I wasn't actually looking at the words.
So it's the very subtle use of language.
So you had the woman saying, the next pandemic could be more lethal.
You're like, well, that's just an absolute bullshit statement.
The next meteorite that strikes the Earth could wipe us all out.
Or maybe it won't.
It's just...
But people just take all this stuff in all the time.
And that kind of pod people thing of people who have known you all your life.
I won't say who it is, but there's people who are as close to me as a human being can be.
They're completely normal.
And then you say, oh, well, I've not got the vaccine.
And literally, Like a cassette will switch on somewhere in some basement and these words will start coming out of the mouth.
What about your social responsibility?
You're an idiot.
Blah, blah, blah.
Do you like Alex Jones?
And all this kind of stuff.
What triggers it for them is like an act of love.
They don't want you to die of COVID.
You know, but but it is actually coming from a place that has got nothing to do with love whatsoever.
Yeah.
So it's like my my my.
This is a really awful analogy.
So I do apologize if anyone's listening to this.
But for me, it's like being in some kind of hellhole prison, where you're going to get raped every day.
And there's no way of ever escaping from this hellhole that you're in.
You could maybe commit suicide.
But what you're going to have to do, you're going to have to just learn to enjoy it.
And that is what most people are doing, basically.
They're learning to enjoy it.
it and they don't even you know that they're there you can see in people's eyes that you've just you've just made the whole interview chat conversation just you've just taken it up to the next level troll level it's going to annoy so many people and it's going to delight so many other people so i think well done mate um and
Andy, will you come back on the... No, nothing to lose.
I like chatting.
As I understand it, what we do is known as chatting shit, I think.
It's just kind of like... I think it is.
Maybe I'm misusing the phrase anyway.
I like the idea that we've been chatting shit.
Please, will you come back on the podcast?
Because you've been great.
I love you.
I love you too, yeah.
It's really good.
Is there anything you want to plug?
Have you got any product?
No, no, I'm not a plugger.
What about Kirk Patrick's pay-to-shed pitons?
Or rope, the rope that doesn't break, even when you fall off a...
No, that's all right.
Well, I'm just briefly going to point out to my beloved listeners that I really appreciate your support on Patreon and Subscribestar, and you can go to dellingpoleworld.com, and I think you can possibly still buy some special friend badges or give me some bitcoins, stuff like that, because I'm not as rich as Andy.
I'm not a world-class mountaineer just rolling in money, so do please support me.
Don't give any money to Andy because he's rich enough already.
Andy, thanks a lot.
That was really good fun.
And we'll speak to you soon, Alex.
Thanks a lot!
Okay.
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