Double Vision
Galway makes the festivals – not the other way round!
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
I never know whether to laugh or cry when I see headlines proclaiming how many millions of euro this event or that festival will bring to Galway’s economy. Quite apart from the fact that after the Volvo Ocean Race finale there were many local people left out of pocket, the idea that cruise liners, events and festivals offer something special to Galwegians is missing the point entirely.
Of course it’s great that people from all over the world and every corner of this island flock to Galway City and County. Race Week would feel strangely empty if it was only attended by Galwegians, but it would still be an amazing festival, because it’s Galwegians that put the magic into any event, not the other way round.
When I arrived here, Galway Arts Festival posters were created by the inimitable and irresistible Joe Boske. His wonderful depictions of our local flora, fauna and culture were as exciting and eccentric as the festival itself.
In its present incarnation, sporting a logo that any multinational pharmaceutical conglomerate would be proud of, the Galway International Arts Festival is incredibly reliable and successful, taking its own productions on sell-out international tours.
However, as first illustrated by the success of Project ‘06 and the subsequent burgeoning Fringe Festival, down on the streets people feel sadly distanced from it.
Ah, and what streets they are! The perfect size for a city, in Galway you can walk everywhere, while if you want to explore the stunning countryside, nothing is more than 90 minutes away.
Quay Street offers the perfect rendezvous for tourists and locals alike and the river Corrib roars through the city centre like a bold artist’s signature at the foot of a painting.
Yet more than the geography of Galway, it’s Galwegians that offer the most. We’ll applaud your IronMan athletes. We’ll greet your Volvo yachts with the greatest welcome any sailor has seen in a century. We’ll host the entire nation for one week every August and everyone, from busker to billionaire, will wear a grin and cross the cobbled streets with a spring in their step.
We’ll do all this because we thrill at human endeavour, appreciate the effort involved in throwing a party and love having a good time. Ask anyone in Ireland to sum up Galway in one word and I’ll put a penny to a pound that they say “craic”.
Galwegians know better than any others how to go with the flow. Arrangements are for sissies round here. You go out and let the evening happen. As you walk through the city, take a look at the other people on the street and notice how many are smiling. I have lived in London, Melbourne and San Francisco: some of the world’s most splendid cities, yet nowhere have I seen such apparently happy people.
To read Charlie’s full column, please see 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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