Tale of teabags, bus stops – and hot seagull pooh!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Ever since I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Irish not doing enough complaining I’ve been bombarded with complaints from complainers, complaining about my complaint about Ireland’s lack of complainers.

Can’t complain, really, I suppose. If it turns out that the one thing guaranteed to rile the Irish soul sufficiently to catapult a complaint is an English gobshite giving out to them, then amen; so be it.

As it happens there’s been a lovely upside for me to this tide of negativity. Whilst forced to contemplate the nature of complaints, memories of my lovely Dad have been dropping into my brainbox.

Dad was a great complainer, and by that I don’t mean that he did it all the time. After an unhappy childhood, Dad wanted his kids to feel more joyful than he had, but when things went wrong, as they inevitably did, he would complain, and when my father complained, you knew it.

Towards the end of his life, long after he’d lost his joie de vivre, Dad combined an embarrassingly low pain threshold with his natural ability to exaggerate anything beyond all reason.

When a kindly hospital nurse gently wiped his face with a warm towel, Dad would writhe and groan and shout:

“Torture. She’s torturing me.”

Sometimes it was quite hard not to laugh, while at the same time hurting to see a beloved parent so distressed.

Back in his complaining prime, Dad added his unique creativity and a dollop of otherworldliness to things that upset him. Once, while visiting me in San Francisco, the family was waiting at a bus stop. Granted, Dad usually either walked or drove, but still I imagined that he’d have some grasp of the delays inherent in Public Transport.

We stood quietly for ages until suddenly, with an assertive Alpha Male clap of his hands, Dad caught all of our attentions, announcing: “Right! Waited long enough now!”

For a second we stood in silence, imagining that as he’d decided we were no longer getting the bus, he’d share with us his plan for our next manoeuvre.

But no. I soon realised there was no plan and could not hold back my laughter.

“Okay, Dad. I’ll just nip round the corner and tell the bus drivers they can come now. They were just parked out of sight, until you decided you were ready.”

Later the same day in a plush hotel on the city’s Union Square, we sat and took tea. My father had been to the States many times before, so I was surprised that he hadn’t yet encountered the American way of serving our national drink.

My amazement was nothing however compared to his stupefaction and bewilderment when presented with a cup of hot water, alongside a tea bag wrapped in a paper sachet.

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