I’ll happily wear burns and scars of creativity!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

My body is covered with scars and scabs, bruises and burns. I’ve not been in a fight. Just waking and sleeping, I pick up knocks and scrapes all the time. Always have done.

The Snapper tells me that it’s because I’m not in the moment. Apparently, when I burn my arm on the handles of the roasting tin, I’m not concentrating. I know those handles well, as I’ve burned my arm on them on countless occasions, but as I raise the heavy tin from the hob, to pour the roast’s deglazed goo into the gravy, I – Ow! Bloody Dammit! Screw that bastard thing! – do it again.

It’s no coincidence that my house is laden with aloe vera plants. Nothing works better softening painful tissue after a burn, but sometimes even that doesn’t work. Last year I awoke in the middle of the night to find a tennis ball-sized swelling on my forearm where my most recent burn used to be.

Filled with fear, I could feel from the heat of this new grotesque injury that an infection had taken over, and in the darkest hours it’s incredibly easy to head down the horror trail of septicaemia, lymph nodes and is it morning yet and please can I go to the doctor now?

While the Snapper’s advice makes absolute sense, life ain’t simple.

On many levels I’m a fan of being in the moment. When I see tourists clasping cameras to their eyeballs as they travel around Connemara, I worry they’re so obsessed by proving they’ve been here, they miss the point of being here. Equally, I try to live in the present. Right now is all we’ve got and all that lardydeedar.

However, as a scribbler, I cannot live forever in that realm. While being creative, I naturally exist in a world of my own. Off with the fairies is too specific. I wander the world with my eyes open, while my brain is somewhere else entirely. In that personal mental bubble, my imagination and thoughts can make joyous whoopee with each other, uninterrupted.

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