Upgrade your setup with FlexiSpot and pick up your favorite! Use my code “YTE730” to save EXTRA $30 off on the E7 Pro and E7 standing desk! FlexiSpot E7 Pro standing desk: https://go.flexispot.com/Tor-E7Pro.
A fool and his money are easily parted, and nobody knows that better than Terry Ball. A longtime fixture in northwest England, he went from selling off-brand shoes, to promoting beers with NSFW marketing, to keeping a safehouse for the actual Neapolitan mafia. His latest scheme, though, is by far his weirdest. For the price of a decent curry, he’ll sell you a box of live snails for you to put in your office. Why? So that shady landlords can skimp on taxes, of course. British bureaucracy is a peculiar beast, but perhaps its most ridiculous side effect is the rise and fall of the Snail Don. Oi mate, you got a loicense for those snails?
What would you do with your lucrative snail farm?
Decorate your office with artsy slime trails – https://torscabinet.com/stor [merch]
Film them mating and put it on OnlyFans – https://www.patreon.com/torscabinet/membership [Patreon]
Give them all little bowler hats – https://x.com/parsons_tor [Twitter]
A selective breeding program to produce the fastest, most intelligent snail – https://facebook.com/torscabinet
Gingerly remove their shells and fraudulently sell them as slugs – https://www.reddit.com/r/TorsCabinet
Snashimi – https://www.instagram.com/tor.from.oregon/
Chapters:
0:00 Rain
1:50 A Beginning
6:27 Taxman
14:46 Old Brown Shoe
20:06 Blackbird
26:45 Nowhere Man
35:39 Tomorrow Never Knows
Sources & Further Info:
– L’Escargotière is still online for now: https://lescargotiere.co.uk/
– Jim Watterson’s investigation, where most of this was sourced from: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball-the-snail-farmer-his-mafia
– The Guardian picks up the story: https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/04/the-long-read-snail-farm-tax-avoidance-scheme-terry-ball
– High-value commercial London real estate, packed full o’ snails: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/133032668#/media?id=media0&ref=photoCollage&channel=COM_LET
– Another tax evasion scheme in London: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/harry-potter-and-the-unpaid-tax-bill
– Michael Gove’s apparently monumental speech on property taxes: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2007-06-07/debates/07060770000001/Rating(EmptyProperties)Bill#contribution-07060770000423
– An earlier legal jam Ball faced: https://www.thebusinessdesk.com/northwest/news/65894-footwear-family-accused-of-shaking-off-creditors
– If I had a nickel for every time a powerful European institution declared snails to legally be fish, I’d have two nickels: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rating-manual-section-2-maintaining-the-rating-list/part-6-exemptions-part-e-fish-farming
– Ball runs afoul of the law once again: https://www.blogpreston.co.uk/2025/05/ribchester-snail-farm-plan-thrown-out-amid-angry-backlash/
– The uncomfortably mob-friendly current Italian government: https://theconversation.com/giorgia-melonis-government-is-watering-down-italys-anti-mafia-laws-four-dangerous-examples-242360
– Boadicea Park: https://stonesyoung.co.uk/property/2-bed-park-home-for-sale-in-preston-road-preston/606814
– In memory of Tommy Ball, who was nearly as ballsy as his son: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/7424015.stm
Episode co-written with Claire Dixsaut (as all my best episodes are) and co-edited with Jesse Willey from @parodyerrorfilms. No AI was used at any step of the way in the making of this video, not even to summarize sources.
47 Comments
I spent ages reading this title and trying to work out what was wrong with it: we tend to say "Northern England", not "North England".
Also, great Dick van Dyke impression! 😉
09:04 that's AI isn't it, god damn it, one more channel down the drain
lovely wasteland reference
THIMBLE IS A BOY THROB FAN!!!! (fun fact, I have seen boy throb preform live twice in person)
God damnit, the far right wing is the worst cesspool in any political system no matter where you go
Inaccessible island rail, wasn’t that just a question on tom Scott’s lateral game show
i think sometime you should do a video on bum farto and where is he. (bum is not his name it was joseph)
I do love a good rail on an inaccessible island…
now this is a certified snepisode
I think the greatest compliment I can give is that a slug trying to sell me office furniture didn't even register as strange.
Man I could always count on you to make weird but interesting videos every week
23:30 "Edel" is a very antiquated term for "noble", and makes no sense in the context of "free-thinking rebels", or beer for that matter. It is only used in either the honorific "edelachtbare" when adressing a judge (there are some lesser known variations but I've only seen those used by exactly two people, one of whom was 92 years old and the other was me and I was being sarcastic) , or the euphemistic "edele delen" when referring to male genetalia. The crown jewels, as it were. So, I mean.. noble shag beer or dick shag beer, you tell me..
Edit: I just remembered another usage of the word Edel, and it's a rare case of what you might call theoretical mathematical linguistics, or something like that. There's a whole list of them, but i'll skip down to the last one which is "Hoogopperaartsvooredelstamoudbetovergrootouder". These are basically a bunch of prefixes strung together that all refer to generations of lineage, much like parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, etc. But unlike English, which simply adds another 'great' for every generation before it, Dutch uses a bunch of different prefixes, which effectively function as a decimal system versus the English binary system. So you end up with words like Hoogopperaartsvooredelstamoudbetovergrootouder which refers to your ancestor of 513 generations ago. Or in English, your great great great great great great well you get the idea.
I’m taking the audio glitch in the intro to mean that this video is by his evil twin named Tor Arsons
It's a nifty loophole, but ultimately he's robbing local residents of all the things the business rates fund (libraries, schools, public infrastructure) to prop up greedy landlords who don't want to pay their fair share. Hopefully all the owed money can be clawed back from them.
17:14 "how does John Lennon know about Tommy Ball?"
One could say he had elite Ball knowledge
This is the first one i already knew about, which is weird considering im from the US
I think the moral of this story is that man will never stop trying to consider snails as fish for the purposes of some legal loophole
As soon as I heard Jim Waterson investigated this, I knew we were in for a wild ride.
I’m a railroad signalman and got the Billups skull and crossbones tatted on my arm after seeing your video, this merch drop is so so sick
1:20 i thought you had a chain around your glasses so you could hang them round your neck and honestly I think you'd rock that look. I'm very sleep deprived so excuse me if thats an insane thought
I wonder what else I could fill with snails for fun and profit
I got a snail stoned once and it tried to eat my finger.
Absolute sninema this snepisode
Escargot tastes identical to clams,
This is the second Tor's Cabinet episode where I've had prior knowledge of the topic.
Anybody else catch the Beatles references in the section titles? I was so excited when I realized!
If I had a dollar for every time snails were categorized as fish in history I would have two dollars. That's not much but weird that it happened twice.
You can't just tease a full video about the intricacies of snails and not deliver! I will be waiting patiently to learn about the snails
The more I find out about Brexit the more obviously corrupt and stupid the whole thing was. I was 16 when the vote happened and like the majority Brits my age feel immensely robbed by the foolishness of our elders now that we’re old enough to be cleaning up their stupidity.
Physically unskippable video title.
Tor going Hollywood with the flexispot ad
22:33 Timothy Dexter reference
Tor is eentually gonna have a zappa stache and i cant wait
oh god. bibleman.
Tor you know I love you but the mustache is not the move
Gyooseppay from Na-Poley
I have a phobia of snails. Cheers for this. I enjoyed watching only the bottom third of this video.
This is a War Thunder special event.
I have had escargot, and honestly, I don't see what is the big deal.
Snails are basically land oysters in that they really only take on the flavor of whatever spices, herbs, oils and butter in which they are cooked.
Still, I find myself impressed by someone who could allegedly make so much money off of snails and shoes.
I almost stepped on a giant banana slug leading a group of people up a mountain in the middle of the night with no flashlight. It’s a good thing that it was mostly bright yellow. It glowed in the dark. I have the same stuffy. They sell them in every gift shop and the mall here on the lost coast. 🐌 🔦
28:09 oh is this related to the real events that inspired the godfather part 3? I watched that movie last night
I sincerely hope that the production quality of these videos never goes way up. A defining feature of this channel for me is the charm of a guy just sitting in front of a camera talking about cool stuff.
Im sure it will probably happen someday as this channel continues to grow, but ill be sad when it happens.
now this is a certified snepisode
Dammit, am I the only one worried that Tor isn't hydrating properly?
quite a unique use of chroma key
now this is a certified snepisode
"We're not endorsing tax evasion by the way" BOOOOO