Double Vision
Why don’t I feel the same sorrow as everyone else?
As the Irish people collectively suffer and grieve through what has become this country’s ‘Lady Diana’ moment, I wonder – not for the first time – what’s the matter with me?
In fact I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with me at all, but I’ve noticed over the years that the way I react to accidental tragedy is not the same as the vast majority of others.
If you find yourself feeling different emotions to everyone else and give half a damn about being a reasonable human being, you have to ask: “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I feel as upset and outraged as everyone else about the senseless death of the Irish students in California?”
Where I appear to be emotionally different, if not exactly deficient, is that I’ve never been able to feel more for one stranger’s loss than another.
Forgive me if I’m sounding disingenuous. It’s no mystery to me why you all feel the way you do.
I completely understand why the Irish feel this pain of loss of their own so deeply. It’s just that I don’t; not in the same way.
It would be easy to explain this national cauldron of boiling tears as the result of a small population feeling strong empathy and a sense of community, yet I recognise the phenomenon.
It’s exactly the same collective grief the English felt when the Princess of Wales died; a moment in time, a gash into the heart of the zeitgeist out of which the tears flowed.
England has a large population, but still they mourned as one, for a stranger. Thirty two million watched her funeral.
The usually stoic English cried in the streets for Diana because, estranged from the royal family, they saw her as a tragic victim of circumstance.
Ireland has recently lost many young people to emigration, and the deaths of these young people has reflected the fears and insecurities of all. Well, nearly all.
Of course I was shocked and sad, but no more than I was for the 53 who died that day in a bus crash in Peru or the 27 who were drowned in a tropical storm in Indonesia.
Did they? The fact that you don’t know illustrates why I feel the way I do.
Such tragic accidents happen all over the world every day, and my heart breaks for every parent who lost a child, every friend who lost a soul mate.
This disparity of feeling with the rest of the population does not apply to tragedies where injustice has been perpetrated.
It does not apply to crimes of hate, prejudice or war.
If anything, they make me feel more angry than most; even vengeful on occasion.
To those of you thinking that I’d feel different if I had my own children, take that ‘Baby On Board’ sticker off your car’s rear window and spend a moment or two contemplating the nature of compassion.
As a man of many faults, I can state with the utmost certainty that emotional constipation is not one of them.
For more from Charlie Adley see this week’s Tribune, download the Digital Edition here or get the Connacht Tribune app from iTunes or Google Play
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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