Galway City has a new superhero: Donkey-Tickle-Girl!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

What is it about the moment when she goes? That feeling in my chest as I watch her car drive down the boreen, waving to me as she sets out to visit her family and friends back in England.

Part of me has been looking forward to the time I’ll spend here alone, and doubtless a substantially larger part of her is pleased to get away from me for a while too.

So there I am on the front step, waving goodbye, with a wistful ripple of beautiful melancholy wafting through my chest. In the words of the great Labi Siffre, ‘It must be love!’

In that instant I wish I’d given her more of a hug, wonder why I’d said that to her, or not more readily forgiven her for saying blah blah blah. I create artificial anxieties about how her leaving might have been more pleasurable for her, more easy, more loving.

As husband and wife, you live together, share your stresses and create new ones, have your ups and downs and live out languorous lists of clichés such as this.

Rarely do we think of our partners as heroic, because each day we experience all of their wonderfully human fallibilities. Sadly it’s often only when we’re apart that we realise our partners are heroes.

We all think we’re heroes at one time or another. However, in the same way that it’s impossible to be ‘cool’ if you think you are, real heroes tend to be people who do not announce their heroism.

Your scribbler has been known to declare that he is a hero. When feeling fragile and insignificant I’ll announce that I was a hero today, and watch the Snapper try desperately to form an impressed look upon her face, as I reveal that single-handedly I’d finished the laundry, or mended a picture frame, turned the compost or cleared a drain. Whatever it was that I’d done, heroism had no place in it.

So this morning, as I watched the Snapper’s car disappear into the distance, I remembered a stormy night over the Christmas period.

It could have been the first of these many mighty storms that have been assaulting us here on the Atlantic edge of Europe. The gusts were shaking the foundations of the house, and the Snapper returned after taking our collie-lab Lady around the garden for her late night peeper (the dog, not… oh you know!)

Excited and pumping energy, she explained how she’d found both wheelie bins blown over, and the full gas cylinder rolled across the lawn. Somehow, with dog on lead in tow, in storm force winds, she’d picked up all the loose papers, cartons, goodness knows what nonsense, returned it all to the bins, which she then secured with the gas cylinder on the leeward side of the house.

I’d been sitting watching TV, picking my toenails.

I told her she was an absolute hero, and wondered how on earth she’d been able to make all those mini-journeys to and fro, picking up the trash, with an excited 3-years-old dog on a lead, eager to explore the storm.

“No problem babe!” she said, and then proceeded to relate how earlier that day, she’d been a hero.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.