Double Vision
Spring is best time to write something new!
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
As spring spreads across the land, offering a revitalising massage for our weather-beaten souls, the rebirth of natural life inspires us to think of beginnings.
I’m so lucky to love my work, and there’s little more exciting for any writer than starting a new book. I’ve just begun one with the working title of Arrivals.
For a couple of decades I moved around the globe, hitch-hiking well in excess of 100,000 miles, searching for something nebulous and elusive.
As you’d expect, on the way I enjoyed a myriad of incredible adventures, and as the stories in my new book will attest, arrivals are often the most dramatic parts of a voyage. Around midnight on November 22, 1984, I walked off a bus at New York City’s Port Authority, pumping with adrenaline at the realisation that I was stepping onto a new continent for the first time.
My head was filled with romantic notions born out of Woody Guthrie’s masterpiece Bound for Glory, while my freshly-purchased Blue Bag was making its debut appearance on my shoulder, as overstuffed with unnecessary clobber as I was with excitement.
I didn’t care that I had nowhere to sleep. Having grown up in London, where the prostitutes of Soho shot coy glances from dusky shadows, I thought I was city smart, but Manhattan was a revelation.
As I wandered onto the street a tall woman walked straight over to me, her hand grasping and then slowly massaging my boy bits.
“Are you gay?” she asked.
“No, but I am broke!” I replied, striding away, humming that line from Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound about “… come-ons from the whores on 7th Avenue…” which I customised to say “…I did not take some comfort there…”
A few hours later I’d somehow managed to blag my way into a free night in a luxurious hotel suite just off Broadway. I bounced up and down on that plush bed, the thrill of victory pulsing through me on that first night of my first round-the-world trip.
Several months and two continents later I walked into a huge Holden car dealership on the outskirts of Melbourne, and asked for a job. The bossman asked if I was the usual Pommie bludger who’d sit around on my arse doing nothing all day. I replied that if I was the usual Pommie bludger I wouldn’t have walked into his garage asking for a job.
“You start Monday!” he replied, but I had to wait another two weeks until I really arrived, after I’d been challenged to a beer drinking competition by my workmates and left their local champion dribbling on the pub carpet.
One of my favourite arrivals was the moment I stepped into the Caribbean off the coast of the Bahamas, realising in a single second that I’d been lied to throughout my entire childhood.
To read the full article, please 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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