What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting thought and I think Yeah, the spectre, I suppose, of drawing blood from living animals is, for our eyes today, as you rightly say, very, very visceral.

It's something that we're just not desensitised to at all.

Will it ever come back? I've been musing on this for quite some time, actually, and I don't think it will in Ireland because I think the skills are long gone, unfortunately.

Right.

But yeah, I suppose from the African context to the European context to the Irish context, yeah, live bleeding was something that was quite a widespread practice, but it was very seasonal as well.

So...

But nowadays everybody's kind of that kind of shrunk, right? We have less farmers now.

So from there, um, how did your path lead you to writing about black pudding? Where did the inspiration come from, and was that something that you grew up eating? Was it part of your life in West Cork or in Bristol?

Yeah, I suppose black pudding is as, uh, you know, is as popular on the breakfast table in the UK as it is in, in Ireland, you know? And that would be, to be fair, in, in, back in England, if you were going to eat black pudding, you'd only really encounter it on, on your morning fry, you know? And a morning fry would be a treat.

It's not something you'd be having all the time.

It might be once a month, once a week if you were really lucky.

Um, and black pudding would always be on there.

So I always have eaten it.

I, I've always eaten it.

But in addition to talking about what we lose when these traditions stop being passed down, what can we do to make sure that that doesn't happen?

And now, I mean, we can get to, I suppose... blood recipes in a minute, but the practice of consuming blood straight from an animal, that seems to have been a very ancient practice and was continued well into the 20th century at least.

Yeah, exactly.

So I suppose the reference that I find in the Tombo Kulina is about, you know, it's a post-battle.

We've got weary warriors sat on the banks of a river looking for something to eat.

And this man comes along with lots of cattle.

And rather than kill the cattle, what they decide to do is take some of the blood from the animals themselves.

that are still alive so these are cows and then they just drink it like that as a raw kind of blood product almost like as a drink and you know they are said to be instantly revived by this practice you know um so that's kind of like the the most simplest way that you can consume it um and then there are sort of other ways as well but yeah there is this practice of live bleeding which was a very skilled thing to be able to do And I suppose in the way we look at it now, it might kind of feel quite gruesome, you know, but actually there was a huge amount of care taken by the human towards the animal in how to take the blood.

Why is it more difficult to get fresh blood? Because I imagine the same amount of animals are still being slaughtered in Ireland.

And now, I mean, we can get to, I suppose... blood recipes in a minute, but the practice of consuming blood straight from an animal, that seems to have been a very ancient practice and was continued well into the 20th century at least.

Yeah, exactly.

So I suppose the reference that I find in the Tombo Kulina is about, you know, it's a post-battle.

We've got weary warriors sat on the banks of a river looking for something to eat.

And this man comes along with lots of cattle.

And rather than kill the cattle, what they decide to do is take some of the blood from the animals themselves.

that are still alive so these are cows and then they just drink it like that as a raw kind of blood product almost like as a drink and you know they are said to be instantly revived by this practice you know um so that's kind of like the the most simplest way that you can consume it um and then there are sort of other ways as well but yeah there is this practice of live bleeding which was a very skilled thing to be able to do And I suppose in the way we look at it now, it might kind of feel quite gruesome, you know, but actually there was a huge amount of care taken by the human towards the animal in how to take the blood.

But would there have been lots of local black pudding?

So, yeah, can you tell us a bit more about that in terms of that sort of, hidden diversity, I guess, and the contribution of women in the making of black pudding and almost in a way that designing of a, I don't even know if I can call it a genre of food, but it seems so particular in a way, you know, it's

such a particular skill.

Yeah, 100%.

So as I mentioned there earlier on, I suppose black pudding was always a homespun food.

And there would be particular times of the years when animals would be slaughtered and their blood caught at the point of slaughter.

And so in the main, I suppose you would get your most amount of blood when you slaughter either a pig or a cow.

And the main slaughtering season for them was at the end of... sort of around October time, we'll say, when the weather had cooled off enough and it was safer then to handle the blood.

So could you maybe tell us a little bit about the colonial impact on blood as food?

Like, t- tell my listeners what boinne clabber was, and then ask were any of them uses.

Yeah.

Well, I s- boinne clabber is, um, a kind of a thickened milk.

So that's kind of in the, in the context of what I'm talking about, um, a kind of savory porridge that used to be made, uh, called a stirabout.

So a stirabout is, as you would imagine, things in a pot that you stir around over a fire until it cooks and thickens.

So, um, sometimes, um- I suppose we think of blood in terms of black pudding, but in times gone by, there, in the, in the summer season, there would've been quite a widespread practice of something called living blood.

So where you would take a small amount of, ah, blood from a living animal, just a little bit, you know, not...

I think a lot of people wouldn't realize that black pudding is made with bl- although it's kind of more s- more, more sort of dried blood, powdered blood these days, isn't it, than the original, than the original's formulas.

So it brought people together, didn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

So I said there it was a homespun food and that's really where it was.

So going back through time, I suppose, you know, a lot of people were subsistence living and self-sufficient.

So they would raise animals, they'd grow a few crops, all the rest of it on their sort of homestead or farmstead.

And so a big part of the food year was, and a trigger warning for any listeners, but it was killing the animal, you know, whether that was a pig or the cow or The cow, when it would come to the end of its useful life, i.e. it was most valued for its what they call the white meats, which was the milk that was turned into butter and various different types of cheese.

But the pig was the only animal that was raised specifically for its meat.

So what makes them different to black pudding? So, yeah, this is

So what happened next? Were you diagnosed with something specific?

Yeah.

So right away when we went in, I went through several fertility specialists and an RE and all of this, mostly because I was of the mindset like, I should have to do more here.

What they're telling me, this can't be real.

So pretty soon, right away, they said, you know, you're a little bit of the, you know, geriatric pregnancy age.

And so let's start looking at egg quality.

And something you might want to consider is donor egg.

How did you navigate all of that?

How do we spice it up a bit?

Well, first of all, salads most definitely are not boring.

And your lunchtime salad sounds absolutely delicious, PJ.

So enjoy that.

I like to think of salads as flavor builders.

So they're completely versatile, whether that's during the summer, during the wintertime, even in autumn time.

They can change through the seasons if you just kind of apply a few basic rules, I guess, around how you build your flavor in the bowl.

Like nothing should be overpowered by the rest of what's in there, I would have thought.

Talk to me about what it's like when you start coming off them, because I've heard that f- for long-term users, sometimes the withdrawal symptoms feel like relapsing, which would be really scary.

Yeah, for me, it didn't feel like relapsing.

It was a really physical response.

So I can tell, like, if I forget to take one of my pills, I can feel it in the afternoon.

It feels like my brain is zapping.

It's almost like there's a CD in my head that's skipping.

I start to get quite, um, dizzy, and I can start slurring my words as well.

Did you feel like you were being made aware of the alternatives before you were being gi- given medication? 'Cause you were so young.