It took polythene bag to make me feel like spring!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

It was all going on just a little too long. Winter wasn’t gone but spring was in and how did that work? I was neither here nor there. Between the frosty blue sky mornings and the warm wet windy afternoons, lived under a carpet of grey, stretching above to each horizon, I was lost, but no longer.

In an earthly visceral way I need seasons, but along with many other aspects of life here in the West of Ireland, lines of definition are blurred. You might turn to the scientifically proven, or prefer meteorological methods. Then there’s the Pagan way, all sorts of Christian and Judaic calendars, lunar cycles and which way the dog farts into the east wind.

Yet really, it’s quite simple.

It’s up to us. If you feel it’s spring then it’s spring.

Trouble was, I didn’t know which season I was in. Each Winter I rig up my extra toasty bedding, with a bare duvet on top of the mattress, under a fitted sheet, below a duvet and a blanket.

Why all the detail? Because if you’ve never done as my good friend in north Mayo advised, and slept through the cold season with a duvet both below and above you, well, what can I say?

There is no warming-up process. You slide in as a cheese slice and instantly melt.

If that image has stunted your libido, I apologise.

Anyway, this year I clung a disgustingly long time to the comfort of all that palaver on the bed, and when I finally picked up the cleaned duvet and washed blanket from the launderette, I said to myself: “Putting winter to bed.”

Well, actually I said it out loud by mistake, but I’m funny like that.

As soon as I heard those words spring instantaneously arrived in my soul; the very same simultaneously in my step.

All around me signs of the new season have been flooding my senses, but confused by the combination of an intimidating To Do list and those harsh March nights, I was feeling unpleasantly out of synch with the season.

Sometimes capable of the odd thought and mildly diverting ramblings, I am and aspire only to be a fairly benign animal, essentially an insignificant bit player alongside the magnificent beasts and beings that wander this planet.

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