Double Vision
Will Adley’s authentic accent please speak up!
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Dalooney, the Body and myself are talking outside Rob Kenny’s lovely café, Pura Vida; just behind us the lads from the council are hammering a pneumatic drill into the bottom of Quay Street.
In less urban corners of the Emerald Isle people seek the first cry of the cuckoo as the signal of spring.
In Galway City, it’s the Lifting of the Cobbles Festival, whereupon hundreds of the thousands of cobblestones lining the streets of the medieval heart of the city are ceremoniously raised and then lowered once again.
The cacophonous cocktail of metal, stone and diesel that’s rebounding off Jury’s walls is so loud it leaves me trying to read The Body’s lips.
As it happens, over the years I’ve tried the same tactic in normal conversation. The Body has a deep and very particular voice, which can be difficult for this Englishman to hear at times.
When himself and Whispering Blue are swapping stories, I sit back and smile – at them not with them – because I don’t have a clue what they’re saying to each other.
One mumbles “Blahimm shissshhhgaboodle?” to which the other replies heatedly “Frickle jug mug kashh-heesh!”
At which point they both roar with laughter and I laugh too, because they are my friends and even if I don’t get their joke, that doesn’t stop the entire vignette being funny to me.
It’s puzzling that after over 20 years I still find it difficult to understand my closest Irish friends, because when I’ve lived out in the countryside, I’ve generally acclimatised to the local vernacular fairly well.
I’m one of those dreadful people whose accent wobbles with the wind. This is no mere fickle foible. I don’t do it on purpose. Neither is it linked to any vain desire to be liked. A fine colyoomist I’d be, if all I sought was acceptance.
However when I try to stop doing it, I consciously have to force myself to talk in my normal voice. Maybe it’s linked to my Jewish history, a desire to assimilate, to blend in? Or is it simply a subconscious desire not to be blamed yet again for the British Empire?
Whatever it is that drives my inadequacy I do know that when aided by several whiskies and abetted by a late night-time hour, my voice grows deep and gravelly while my accent becomes sufficiently authentic to make a Connemara farmer ask
“Local man, are ya? Where is it you’re from then?”
I was in no way trying to pass myself off as local, but he was genuinely shocked to find out I was a Londoner. Mind you, my friend in Castlebar has for years shrieked with horror and shrunk back whenever I unleash what she delightfully describes as
“Your feckin’ leprechaun voice.”
She reckons that himself the farmer and all others who’ve mentioned my accent in any complimentary way were taking the piss, telling me how good it was, while I was foolish enough to swallow their bait.
I’m naturally paranoid, and therefore see myself as pretty good at identifying verbal attacks, but I’m not Irish so I cannot disagree with her.
To read Charlie’s full column, 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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