Play the 10-foot float you brooding onus. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast. It's the

first of February and I've been noticing the promise of sunlight. Climate change can't

fuck with sunlight. The evenings are ever saw slightly longer. Just a little bit longer,

but even better than the length of the day. It's the quality of light. It feels like someone

opened the curtains a little bit. The purple darkness of winter is leaving and there's

a fluorescent sparkle to the evenings. Which just make me feel optimistic. That's what

spring is supposed to do. That's what the first of February is. It's spring. Spring is

all about optimism and hope. And the biggest symbol of spring in Ireland for sure is the

cross of St. Bridget. And I saw my first one yesterday in the door of a shop. The cross

of St. Bridget. It's handmade from straw. And it doesn't look like a cross, like a

crucifix. Technically it's technically it's a swat sticker. It's a cross on its side.

It's kind of diagonal. And when I say swat sticker there, you might immediately think

of Hitler. The Nazis roamed the swat sticker. The Nazis didn't come up with the swat sticker.

They appropriated it and made it a symbol of hate. But swat stickers have been around

for a thousand years. They're present in Eastern religions to mean re-bart. And St.

Bridget's cross is the Irish swat sticker really. And we make them. And I say we because

every Irish school child had to make St. Bridget's crosses at this time of year. When you

are six or seven in school, the teacher would bring in a lot of straw and you'd learn

how to fold and make a St. Bridget's cross. But we would have been told about this in

Christian context. Like I remember our teacher told us, even though I think this might

have been wrong, you're making a St. Bridget's cross today because St. Bridget used this cross

to teach the Irish about Christianity in the way that St. Patrick used the shamrock to

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