May is out, sun is out – this man is out too!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

AT last our natural world here in the west of Ireland is bursting with life. I can feel underneath me as I walk a burgeoning latent power, eager to rise, erupt, unfurl and bloom, to blossom and produce fruit.

After that long winter and Storm Emma, the month of April passed as a numbing grey cloud and now it seems our local ecosystem is in a heck of a hurry to catch up with itself. The may is out; dazzling white flowers on the leaf of the hawthorn, alongside the white flowers on the buds of the blackthorn. They have usually come and gone by now, but with bluebells dancing alongside primroses, everyone in the ground is shaking their natural booty thang together this spring.

Given a few hours of solitude and an absence of rain, your scribbler has been out there too, fulfilling – or rather, trying to avoid repeating – my annual destiny.

Until the compost I made last year is spread, I can’t start to make compost once again.

Of course I can, but within my neurotic little existence and the chaos that is my brainbox, this seasonal ritual creates a tiny bit of order.

Each year I lift the grey plastic sheet, reveal the new compost, and proceed to load the wheelbarrow, at some point completely screwing up my back and carrying on regardless.

Has to be done, dammit.

Nothing more important for the soil – gaaawooorr! – and what did I go to all the trouble of making it for, if I’m so feeble a man I can’t even spread my own – ooh ooh ca-ha-oooghhh –

– breathe –

– compost?

This year I set a target of weeding the wildflower bed and shifting the compost without leaving myself on anti-inflammatories and heat pads. Thankfully I’ve a secret weapon, in the shape of ten stretches which I do, well, not exactly every morning, but 5 in 7, or 4 maybe, but you know, I do them and thank goodness.

They take about 25 minutes and have transformed my life.

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