Double Vision
Thirty years on, I’m still loath to mention her name!
I tried not to write about her. You’ve all read, heard and seen so much about the woman, you doubtless need a break.
But I can’t help it. Thirty years later it still feels raw.
Being a hopelessly non-violent man who is generally crap at confrontation, there have been few people who’ve earned my hatred. It seems absurd to hate a distant dead woman, yet when I think of her, a raging anger inside me burns like acid through to the core of my soul and sense of justice.
I occupied the same space as her on two occasions, but the time I felt her presence most darkly and profoundly, she was physically far away.
As an eleven year old in 1971, my Tory parents took me to a meeting where the then Education Secretary for Edward Heath’s government was to make a speech. She’d recently scrapped a programme of free milk for the under-7s, and earned a moniker that would haunt her entire career. Edward Short, then the Labour education spokesman, described her action as “… the meanest and most unworthy thing I have ever seen.”
Far too young and ambivalent to care about such things, I do remember my dad getting flustered and red in the face when a bunch of protesters started shouting “Milk Snatcher! Milk Snatcher!” from the back of the hall.The next time I shared a space with the woman she was at the height of her power, at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth in October 1986.
Somehow I’d got a gig running a stall for the Glass Manufacturers Federation at all three party conferences that year. After a feeble gathering of Liberals in Harrogate and a hopeless and depressing Labour Party effort in Blackpool, the Conservative Party conference was doubtless the main event.
It was only two years after the IRA had bombed her hotel at the Brighton conference, so Bournemouth had been transformed into a military enclave. Snipers strolled rooftops, checkpoints popped up everywhere and it was all a bit intimidating. Yet nothing compared to the afternoon she made her conference speech.The convention centre was vast but crammed with an atmosphere of electric anticipation.
A half hour before her speech, I was sitting in the bar, watching the usually calm journalistic colossus Robin Day twitch and flit around like a schoolboy with itching powder in his pants. Geoffrey Howe and Malcolm Rifkind were skulking about the corridors, speaking in hushed tones, as if God might hear their conspiracies.
Predictably, the moment she appeared on stage the place went berserk. Even though I was standing as far away as is possible while being present, I still felt the tsunami of charisma that emanated from the woman.
For more, read 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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