Bernard O'Shea launches new Irish Examiner column
Bernard O'Shea has plenty of New Year's resolutions, which he will be sharing with Irish Examiner readers from next week.
As comedian and new Irish Examiner columnist Bernard O’Shea says, once lockdown hit “you either got a dog or you got into wellness.” The father of three chose to go for the latter, seeing as his young children already “own,” him, and to write about his experiences for Irish Examiner Lifestyle readers.
“I’m going to try out new experiences and influences that are trending online. From bizarre diets, freakish fashion, food and fitness fads to experimenting with unusual beauty products,” he explains over Zoom from his Dublin city office.
Having prepared by buying himself some unusual Christmas gifts, such as specialty earplugs that promise to extract wax and an experimental gumshield to make his face look younger, O’Shea is all set for his new weekly column which debuts on January 11.
“A lot of these things are thousands of years old but are being repackaged again and again,” he says. For example, presenter Amanda Byram first told O’Shea about the ancient art of oil pulling, where one swishes coconut oil around the mouth for 15 to 20 minutes to promote healing and mouth hygiene. However O’Shea, a frequent sufferer of mouth ulcers, unfortunately thought the idea was to swallow the oil when he first tried the method out.
“I leaked oil on the Luas. Oil came out of me” he laughs. “They sell you this s*** as if it’s going to transform your life. Google is a phenomenal place.”
Leakage experience aside, O’ Shea isn’t setting out with the aim of trying to prove these trends to be crazy fads and is excited for many elements, such as veganism, dawn sea swimming, and the act of grounding.
“Grounding is the practice of connecting to a natural electric charge in the planet,” he explains. “At first glance, it’s like taking off your socks and standing in a field but there’s always a lot more to it and several Irish people swear by it.
“I did agricultural science in secondary school and the first thing they teach you is that the earth has positive and negative charges so it is well known. The idea is that you go into somewhere that is positively charged and become one with the earth.”
Any fans of The Happy Pear chefs will be well aware of O’Shea’s next plan, sea swimming at dawn. However, there might be an added twist to his morning dip.
“Two years ago myself and Marty Morrissey did this thing called Wim Hof method. Wim Hof is a German guy who started this idea of swimming in freezing cold water. It's very new age but also scientifically proven,” he explains.
“You do this guided breathing process which effectively cuts off the oxygen to your brain and you keep holding your breath for longer periods. I’ve done it twice now and I’ve gotten these surges of colours and I remember the first time I did it I kept seeing my son Tadhg. It’s bizarre because you can stay in the ice for hours. So, I'm going to do the method again and the dawn swimming because they’re quite similar.”
While the idea of watching Morrissey and O’Shea dive into the freezing Atlantic sounds like the perfect pitch for a new TV show, there’s more than just the entertainment element behind O’Shea’s plans.
“I want to embrace the outdoors a bit more this year. I want to stop worrying about things and try and do my best to cut through what I think things like grounding are and see if I can connect to nature in some way,” he explains.
“I’m an unbelievably cynical person, which is helpful if you’re a comedian but it’s not handy if you’re going out to meet people who are, say dawn swimming, and they feel it’s a huge part of their lives and that they’re a different person because of it.
O’Shea has also already started to experiment with his diet for the column, spending Christmas week completely sugar-free.
“I must have spent two hours trying to figure out what I was going to eat every day. You would not believe the amount of sugar that’s in things. There’s probably sugar in this,” he says as he holds his empty mug up toward the grainy screen.
“I didn’t know what I was going to eat. You basically end up eating potatoes, meat, and vegetables. No sauce. No bread, particularly Irish bread, which I love. It’s basically flour, water, and sugar. But there was no better time for my health than Christmas.
"I went to see a therapist while writing my last book to find out why I was eating at night because I would eat a tub of ice cream, and she said it’s a sugar hangover, like how people crave a drink at night. A GP friend told me that sugar is basically killing us."
Now that his sugar-free week is behind him, O’Shea is planning to dabble with fasting as well as veganism, which he previously trialed for six weeks for his last book.
“It’s called a whole food diet because it’s a pain in the hole. I felt like all I was doing was chopping and chopping,” he laughs. “But I stuck to it and I found my eyesight got better and my mood. I lasted six weeks but I was told then that I didn’t do veganism properly. So I’m going to try seven days of full-on, extreme, veganism. No leather products, no honey, no alcohol. Like if a car has leather seats you can’t get in it.”
Other plans for the column range from hot stone and crystal meditation to learning how to knit. For his own personal New Year’s resolutions, the comedian is trying to read more during the current Level 5 restrictions, having spent last year’s lockdowns navigating the filming of his new television programme, which is set to air on RTÉ early this year.
As well as the new column and show, where O’Shea goes into places such as Fota Wildlife Park and Irish Rail to teach workers to do stand-up, you may also see the author try his hand at lifestyle reporting and possibly making a start on his next book this year. On the long-finger for the moment, however, is his next stand-up tour.
“I might wait until 2022 to tour. It’s too difficult right now. So many of my friends have gone and booked shows and rebooked and they’re just fed up. It’s hard to book tickets at the best of times and I’m not a massive fan of doing [shows] online.” he explains.
“I’m getting into things now that I’ve always wanted to do but never had the chance. I’m blessed because when I left radio I was working on three programmes and a book and a tour but I did want to get to this point and it took two years to get here, so I’m really looking forward to doing this. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
And with that, O’Shea’s phone rings and he apologises for having to run out to prevent his car from getting clamped. We’ll find out if he connected to any earthly, or monetary, charges along the way soon.
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