Can hills love you back? Connemara’s hills can!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

After they discovered at A&E that my chest pains and breathlessness were not the result of a heart attack, but a common yet fiendish cocktail of stress, exhaustion and anxiety, I decided to get some counselling.

There’ll be one or two of you out there now muttering to yourselves ‘Oooh, he’s so honest, sharing personal stuff like that!’

To you I suggest that you might not feel safe driving a car without a steering wheel. All of us will seek help when our bodies break down, snap or become infected, yet still so many think that their minds are beyond cure; nobody’s business but their own.

As luck would have it I’d already made an appointment weeks before with a counsellor in Clifden.

My intention had originally been to seek a little help for myself and glean advice from someone who knows their stuff about how to best help the Snapper. As it turned out, helping anybody but myself was a concept far from my brainbox by the time that Friday came around.

The Thursday evening before, I was teaching my Craft of Writing Course at the Westside Community Resource Centre. I absolutely love delivering those lessons, but when I return home after them, I’m a hyperactive bouncing ranting fool.

It takes me ages to fall asleep so with my session starting at 10am, I decided I’d drive to Clifden after class, stay in a B&B and wake refreshed and ready to make the most of any counsel coming my way.

Regular colyoomistas will already be familiar with my love affair with Connemara, but although I used to live out there, and over the years have hitched, walked and driven every road and bohreen to enjoy fresh perspectives of God’s own fruit bowl, the Twelve Pins, I’d never driven through it during a summer’s twilight.

Oh my God. It was both gently and dramatically so beautiful I nearly drove off the road three or four times, as my eyes were drawn to another combination of black granite and soft pink lake; of distant clouds that might have been hills, and hills that could have been clouds.

Ethereal, majestic: no words do justice to those blends of stark and subtle, stone and water, light and dark.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.