Money won’t buy happiness but I do love spending time!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Stuff doesn’t matter that much to me. I don’t drift through life wishing I owned this car or that washing machine. When I lived in the USA, I failed to feel compensated for my long working hours and lack of holiday time by buying stuff.

Everyone else I knew, intelligent sensitive people, raised their pulses as they clutched shopping bags and ordered items for delivery, while I simply dreamed of a couple of days off.

Eventually I decided to give consumerism a go, so I took myself downtown and walked into the Virgin Megastore, determined to buy movies and music. After hours browsing I left with two DVDs and a CD, but felt neither excitement nor fulfilment.

Owning things doesn’t bring me happiness, but free time to sit and stare, to scribble, to walk myself into a sweat along the bohreens of Co. Galway, between the meadowsweet, purple loosestrife and fuchsia laden with orchestras of buzzing bees: all of the above bring me joy.

There is one reliable way in which I combine the spending of money and time to pleasurable effect, as I did the other week when I spent a solitary evening wandering the streets and pubs of a small town in west Clare, observing, participating and thoroughly enjoying myself.

Walking into the town early on a summer’s evening, the stench of chip fat hangs heavy on the air. For a moment the gloopy aroma is almost overpowering, but then I turn a corner and – phew, breathe! – it’s gone.

In front of me is a familiar parade of pubs. Which is offering the real Ireland in this tourist haven tonight? Sadly one of the larger hotels in the town has closed down, so I slide into the bar next door to find it almost empty, save for two very obliging bar staff trying to ignore the two regular customers sat at the bar.

Ordering my Jameson I sit quietly, relishing this moment of public privacy. However it soon becomes clear that I cannot ignore the heated conversation going on to my right.

Sitting on his barstool, wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of eyebrows as white and crazily wild as an Atlantic breaker in a winter storm, yer man is trying to explain to his mate how the government has sold Ireland to global corporations.

Standing in front of him, tall and lithe, sporting a weary worry-heavy facial expression and a complexion that’d make a beetroot appear anaemic, his mate looks as if he’s heard it all before.

The debate, diluted substantially by the amount of drink on the two men, is reduced to that essentially Irish form of communication, in which there is an Insister and a Resister. What is said matters less than pulling off a victory, and the lads make a great cabaret.

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