Double Vision
Deprived of sleep and starting to go out of my very tiny mind!
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Sleep sleep glorious sleep. I love sleep and sleep loves me. When sleep leaves me, as it has done recently, I crumble like a man who’s lost his lover.
We all have our Achilles heel, and mine is sleep, or rather, the lack thereof. Given a good night’s kip I can face anything that the universe might throw at me, but after even one night’s dodgy slumber I’m lost.
If my recent lack of sleep were the result of a hectic social life I’d be delighted, but I’ve not been drinking. I’ve not been to bed late. I’ve been a good little scribbler, who has for the last six nights woken up somewhere between 2am and 4.30am each day.
If I was writing this in April I might understand my rhythms better. Each year as the sun rises earlier and earlier, I tend to wake up at ridiculously impractical times. To be honest, although it’s a pain when that happens, I don’t mind too much. It feels somewhat primal, as if the bear that lurks inside me is emerging from hibernation, greeting the new season with an eagerness and desire to make the most of all the daylight hours.
Yet as we enter what the Irish rather optimistically call ‘Spring’, my early waking has nothing to do with the fact that the sun is rising a little earlier each morning. To this Londoner, February is still Winter. Even though the sap is rising in the willow whips outside; even though there are buds appearing on the soft fruit bushes and a tiny creep of light is appearing in the early evenings, as if somebody has left the dark door of Winter ajar, I cannot pretend that my present sleep deprivation is driven by the seasons.
As any true insomniac will tell you, lack of sleep feeds upon itself. Aware of the fact that you have not slept well, you go to bed dreading another bad night, which creates in itself a certain disastrous self-fulfilling prophecy.
Years ago I used to work alongside a true insomniac and it was a terrible thing to see the effect the condition had upon him.
The moment he walked in the door I was able to tell whether he had failed to sleep the night before. His shoulders would be slumped forward, his pallor turned grey and the fire of positivity that usually lurked just behind his eyes was replaced with a resigned sadness; his usual passion for the job transformed into a dreadful acceptance that exhaustion was to be his lot for the foreseeable future.
Thankfully I am not an insomniac, as at least 340 times each year I fall asleep somewhere between 10.30pm and 11.30pm, and (apart from the middle aged male middle of the night peeper) wake around 6.30am or 7am. For that I give much thanks, as those seven or eight hours of restorative slumber allow me to function as . . . well, I was going to say ‘a normal human being’, but I suppose that’s for others to judge!
Were this a particularly stressful time I would better understand, but it’s not. Yet for the last six nights I have had such an active brain that after waking in the middle of the night, there is no more rest to be had.
To read the whole/entire/all of the article, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The crowds that flocked into the centre of Dublin last weekend provided the clearest indication yet that, thank God, a cure had been found for Covid.
The masses dancing and hugging on the streets was vindication that all of the self-isolation had been well worth it, when you could now congregate as close as you like to each other, to your little heart’s content.
Or so you’d think.
One weekend of slightly relaxed licencing laws was all it took, and in the blink of an eye thousands of revellers were up and at it like this was Paris in 1945 after it was freed from the Germans.
The newly-imposed regulations for relaxation would suggest that all of these bouncy people at least had the benefit of a nine-euro meal inside them – how else could they get served?
So, we’d better brace ourselves for when they go out on an empty stomach.
Much has already been made of the fact that pub life will never be the same again – and that might well be the case.
Social distancing is bad news for the publicans, limiting their ability to wedge the entire student population of NUIG and GMIT into the equivalent of a phone box.
But it’s great news for curmudgeons – particularly for those whose capacity for imbibing alcohol is shot.
Advancing middle age has seen the tolerance of the early twenties reduced from the equivalent of a sizeable plastic bucket to an amount that once wouldn’t have even pass the standard definition of being out.
Three pints? That’s what you’d order when they rang the bell at closing time.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Double Vision with Charlie Adley
More than any other time of the year, when we sit around our dinner tables on Christmas Day, we are aware of who is there and who is not. At the age of 17, having performed impressive acrobatics with my Yamaha 250, a saloon car, a ditch and a barbed wire fence, I spent six weeks in hospital over Christmas and New Year.
My femur was snapped in two, which is no mean feat with thighs like mine, and my tibia had a crack or two as well.
Bed-bound, with my leg in traction, I developed a bronchial chest infection after an emergency operation.
Every two seconds for six weeks I coughed in hacking spasms, thus shaking my smashed leg, which was hung in a sling, supported by a metal pole they had driven through me, just below the knee.
Suffice to say I came to terms with pain.
In our part of the ward, there were four beds and three bikers with broken bones.
There was Kev, who had fallen off his sleek and mean Suzuki GT750 (a two stroke 3-into-1, since you ask), and opposite us two was brick shithouse Yorkshireman Gary, ex-SAS, and mighty embarrassed, having survived several covert tours of duty in Northern Ireland, to have to admit to falling off a Honda 125.
Compared to the other patients in the hospital the three of us were well off.
We were not sick. We’d had our operations, and apart from antibiotics for wounds, and pain killers for broken bones, we needed very little medical attention.
We were young, male, bored, and allowed to drink beer. Naturally, we tried to attract the attention of the student nurses as much as possible, and equally, they were happy to have a bit of a laugh with lads who were not ill, physically, at least!
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Saying “I love newspapers!” feels these days like buying a ticket for the next David Bowie gig, but I do: I love them. When I read a newspaper, I’m not a slave to the algorithm. Were I ten years younger, I’d read all my news online, on apps that I’ve set to my personal preferences.
Even when I visit media sites I’ve never been to before, there are cookies and bots and gordknowswot working away to offer me more of what the algorithms think I want.
Every link off each page is tailored to please me, but that’s no good.
I don’t want to be fed things that only fit into my areas of interest and opinion.
Sitting at my living room table, mug of tea and two slices of toast (peanut butter, since you ask), and a paper – any paper – open in front of me, I can see the full wonder and horror of the world, as interpreted by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Irish Times or Daily Mirror.
As I browse into the heart of the paper, far from major news items, I let my eyesight fall all over the place, because each page is full of varied items, and, here on page 14, I’ll find the big story that’s being buried: the story they have to report, but are under instruction to dampen down.
Also here are stories that no algorithm-driven link would ever lead me to. Quirky little tales, able to dissolve an adult brain in seconds.
When driven sufficiently doolally by what I’m reading, I tear that particular piece of madness out of the newspaper, placing it on top of the wobbly towering stack of other torn madnesses by my desk.
There are dark torn madnesses and fearsome ones, but today I’m in the mood to prowl the ones that force me to furrow my brow, gasp for breath, pout my lips and grunt “What the -?” at the universe.
Notes are seeds, from which every writer will grow different fruit. When that writer is working for the Daily Mail, the fruit need bear only minuscule relation to the seed.
To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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