Double Vision
Our two days of glorious gardening with gate shut
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
It all comes together perfectly. The Snapper and I both have two days off work. The sun shines in a cloudless pale blue sky. The front gate is closed and we aren’t going anywhere. Nobody wants anything from us and we don’t want anything apart from this: working together and apart in the garden.
You can almost feel overwhelmed when you first look at your garden after Winter, but it’s a mistake to turn this work into a burden. There’s never any point worrying about what you haven’t done, nor how much there is to do. As long as you get on with what you can do, and on the way make it what you want to do, worry can take early retirement.
It’s a pleasure, a joyous pleasure to be out in the sunshine, fingers in the soil of this tiny corner of the world. Beautiful soil it is too, able to both crumble and clay into a ball. Loads of big fat happy worms are working their way through this flower bed, on a tiny ring of limestone a few hundred yards from Lough Corrib. A quarter of a mile up the lane you hit bogland, but here the ground is lush, almost alluvial.
While the Snapper walks Lady Dog I start on the weeding. These days it’s not enough to plan the tasks ahead, I also have to factor in what my ageing body might sustain. So instead of going hell bent for leather and weeding the whole bed in one go, I stop half way, standing to stretch and groan a little.
My God! This place is glorious on such a day. Staring at the fields beyond, my mind wanders to those Paddy’s Day crowds elsewhere; all those thousands thronging the streets of Galway, and the village up the road; all those pints, parades and people.
Here right now it is incredibly peaceful, save for the welcome return of a wide variety of birdsong and the occasional stamp of hoof from the old piebald.
My girls return from their walk, the Snapper telling stories of how Lady ate a dead duck and rolled in a pile of pooh. That’s about as good as it gets for a dog, so we put the long training leash on her and hook her up to the pole of the twirly laundry dryer.
Lady is a rescue dog with a predilection for chasing anything on four legs. Yet thankfully for once there are no other dogs around, nor any nearby livestock to tempt and distract her.
She lies on the lawn, delighted for the chance to be outside, while we execute our minor St. Patrick’s Day tradition: welcoming back the garden by sowing sweet pea seeds.
There are endless debates about whether you should sow them inside or out, in Autumn or in Spring, but I plant them into containers in situ on Ireland’s national day, confident they’ll completely cover the ugly heating oil tank by the end of July.
To read Charlie’s full column, 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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