Don’t hate winter – you’re wasting 25% of the year!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

When I told my Galwegian friends in 1994 that I was leaving Salthill to live in Connemara, in a little house between Ballyconneely and Slyne Head, they collectively shook their heads and rumbled worries.

“The winter wind will drive you crazy,” they warned. “People go bananas, living alone out there, mate.”

While I knew they were only being kind, they were underestimating my own madness, the built-in bonkers brain I carry that loves people but finds them hard to be around. Connemara couldn’t drive me crazy because I was already there.

After washing up on Ireland’s shores a couple of years before, I was lucky to find myself befriended by an excellent crew of local lads, now life-time friends.

Our nights out ran from An Tobar to Taylor’s bar to Vagabonds, and I enjoyed every one, but the lifestyle was causing my body to crumble, my spirit to wane.

After countless exploratory hitching trips, I’d fallen desperately in love with Connemara, and was raving with excitement at the prospect of living there, in rural solitude.

I longed to turn off my bedside light at eleven and awake at seven, so that I could lie there snug for another hour, feeling smug and grateful that I was neither on a crammed tube train, nor freezing cold waiting at a bus stop.

I loved my first Winter alone in that bleak moonscape. With the ocean not more than a mile to the north and west and only three to the east, I’d rise after my hour of smugness and walk to a beach before breakfast.

No distractions, no demands: simply walk and sit and write all day.

At 4pm I’d walk the 1.8 miles (I told you I was crazy and yes, I need to know distances like that) to Keogh’s pub where I’d make myself perfectly squiggly before walking home for dinner.

Many days I’d speak to nobody, save for the bigots on Marianne Finucane’s Afternoon Call – yes, Ireland had ritualised daily moaning before Joe Duffy – yet never did I feel lonely.

After 10 days of this healthy productive living, I’d climb into my transit van and race along the N59 for two days of guiltless hedonistic consumption in Galway City.

Three mornings later, I’d load the van with shopping at Quinnsworth, and drive slowly and carefully back along the N59, my aching head and trembling body desperate for recovery and solitude once again.

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