Sit down, calm down and watch life for a minute!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

If you’re standing next to doctor at a party, it’s hard not to mention your back pain, or your son’s allergies. In the same way, as a scribbler, people are always coming up to me with broad smiles and exuberant enthusiasm, announcing:

“Hey, I’ve got something for you to write about!”

It’d be plain ignorant not to listen to them, but more often than not their suggested material is exceptionally personal.

While they think they’d like to see their tale of woe splashed over the media, nine times out of ten, I don’t want the responsibility of being the bearer of their news, so I simply suggest that they should write about it themselves.

A hurt look appears in their eyes as they feel rejected, so then I have to rub salve on their wound.

“It’ll sound better coming from you. You feel it more!” I explain. “Send it to me when you’re done and I’ll edit it for you if you like.”

What mystifies me though is the tacit feeling among others that I might be suffering from a shortage of things to write about. Clearly their offers come from a benign and well-intentioned place, but do I approach architects and suggest houses they might build? Do I wander into a butcher’s and ask if I can cut up a carcass?

More to the point, do they really suppose that in a world crammed with 7 billion humans, there might ever be a lack of material?

Regular colyoomistas might by now be familiar with the way I describe our species as comprised of the ‘Four Effs of Humanity’, but for you newbies out there it works like this: all of us are Freaked Out (life is scary), F**ked Up (we were raised by other humans), Fallible (yes very) and Fantastic (something we all too readily forget).

Given that unique cocktail of horror and joy, humans present themselves as the perfect inspiration for this scribbler.

Sitting outside Tigh Neactain on this rare sunny afternoon, I’m watching life in many of its forms on Galway TV.

When I first arrived here in 1992, Galway was a city with a tourist season. Now it is very much a tourist city. Twenty years ago the only class of tourist you’d find on the streets of the city at this time of year were well-off Americans whose kids had gone off to college.

Now coach parties parade along Quay Street, each pair walking next to and behind the others, as if still in position on the bus.

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