Do you know which village is in my note?

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

As my friend told me about his latest motorcycling escapades, my brain drifted off, deep into the past. “You know who you’d’ve liked, mate? Freebase Kevin!” Pushing his chin and bottom lip up towards his nose, he frowned and tilted his head to the left.

“Nah, don’t think I’ve ever met him. Was he from Galway, Cha?”

“Well, Freebase did make a few appearances in Galway, but he was first invented when I lived in Cambridge, back in 1981. I’ll fish out some old copies mate. I’m pretty sure you’d like them, if I can find ‘em!”

The people of Cambridge were divided into two spheres: town and gown. Working as a sales rep, I was defined a townie, but my social life was completely student gownie.

Many of my lifetime friends from London were students at various colleges, and as one who worked for a living, I was seduced by their ethereal dream of a lifestyle.

I loitered in their subsidised bars, stuffed my face with luxurious foods at picnics on Midsummer Common, and enjoyed drunken dawn punt rides up the Cam to Grantchester.

Many of the students were intensely irritating and supremely ignorant of what others called the real world.

Their fingernails had experienced neither dirt, nor oil nor grease, and I felt the urge to slag them off, so I started writing a column about a townie, called ‘Freebase Kevin – the drug-crazed biker’, letting him ride roughshod over their prissy privileged student existences.

Much to my delight, Freebase’s column started to appear in the Cambridge University Broadsheet.

Apparently at that time I was the first non-student ever to have a regular slot in the student zine. Evidently, to their credit, they enjoyed a good slagging off.

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

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