Greetings, you bendy Evans. Welcome to the Blind By Pad guest. We're approaching the end

of January and I'm sensing an optimism in the quality of the light that's out there.

The winter sun, I've spoken about the winter sun before, I'm not a big fan of the winter

sun. It's very sideways, it's not a particularly confident sun, it's a very strange color. It's

like the dust that rises from a more deep peach. But this week I noticed the first glimmer

of intensity. The sun has become a little bit more intense, it's given out more light.

And I just had that lovely that that brings with it a feeling of optimism, a feeling of

optimism that we're about to enter spring. And let's not be fooled by February and March.

Those are conty months. But there's a wonderful promise to them. You know what's going to

happen afterwards. So the Irish government very suddenly lifted all COVID restrictions,

which to be honest, I'm cautious about because it just has that feeling of everybody in

the Irish government together at once saying it'll be grand. It just has that vibe about

it. It's like I don't trust them. I don't trust their decision. I think they just

give up and said, fuck it up and everything up. So I'm both very happy that that's happened,

but also very cautious. But the positive thing is it means that my gigs in February and

March are now going ahead, which is good news. And it's good and bad news. So the Irish

government made a pretty toned-deaf decision around the entertainment industry in November.

And they brought in these sudden restrictions that were like, live gigs can only go ahead

but at 50% capacity. You can't run a gig at 50% capacity. You can't pay everybody

if you do that. So 95% of artists just cancel their gigs or reschedule them. Now the thing

is November in December is when most entertainers kind of earned their money for the year because

what you do is you announce your tour in November in December and then you sell your tickets

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