Sunday 3 March 2024

What about individual citizens?


Referendums in this country used to scare the pants off me.

Can a pregnant woman leave the country?
Should a phone number remain illegal?
Is the life of a woman as important as the baby she’s carrying in her womb?

Within two decades of those referendum questions, you’d voted through the world’s first plebiscite on Marriage Equality.

It’s been an exciting privilege to live here over the last 32 years, experiencing this country’s emergence from an oppressed and oppressive past into a modern liberal democracy.

However sometimes it takes an outsider to see what’s going on, and now that Ireland has caught up with the First World on economic and demographic matters, it’s so important that the Irish grasp this chance to change these two Amendments.

They represent anachronistic evidence of how the Church of Rome played midwife to the birth of Ireland’s republic. They have no place in any country’s constitution.

Why on God’s good earth are we asking if a woman’s place is in the home?

Why is the Family with a capital F defined as Ireland’s “… natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society … a moral institution … superior to all positive law...”?

Because that’s the template the Catholic Church traced over Ireland’s nascent constitution.

This is where some of you will write me off as being anti-Catholic Church, and you couldn’t be more wrong.

I’m delighted that you have your faith, and hope it brings you comfort, but the Church belongs in a church, and not in a nation’s constitution.

Tragically, women, carers and lone parents of all genders will continue to serve their families and society with unpaid work, regardless of any so-called protections written into the constitution.

They must be paid for their work and protected by law, with rights imposed by legislation, constantly updated to be economically relevant and viable, by this and every subsequent government.

What of those like me who do not fit into these parameters of protection? I’m divorced, single, childless, with my non-Irish family living in England.

If the family remains natural, primary and fundamental, then that’ll leave me and a whole lot of Irish citizens feeling unnatural, secondary and inconsequential.

Is it too much to ask that our constitution sees us all as equal individuals? In the 21st century every citizen must matter. Each of us is individually primary, a fundamental and unique part of this nation.

During the Tiger years I was a Youth Worker in Ballybane, one of the more socioeconomically challenged areas of Galway City.

Our project was based in what was then called the Family Resource Centre, a title that left
me feeling uneasy.

Ballybane was the early recipient of immigrants from Africa, many of whom were single.

How would they feel when they saw the wording on the exterior of the building?

Why might they feel we were there for them too?

I suggested to the centre director that we change the name, and it became the Community Resource Centre.

I then went door to door, canvassing the local single population, making sure they were made aware that many of the organisations housed under our one roof were there to support them too.

I’m proud to say I’m now an Irish citizen, so I can vote in this referendum, but where a simple YES and YES should be the order of the day, I wonder if I might just abstain.

All of us single souls with no family are invisible in this debate, and it’s quite difficult to feel involved. Many immigrants must feel the same.

It’s such a shame that, just as we have in past referendums, so many rationalise reasons to not vote for positive and necessary change.

Our relationships and family have nothing to do with anyone except us.

Having grown up in England as a mere subject, in a constitutional monarchy with no written constitution, I rather hoped that a modern republic would care primarily for the rights of each citizen.

It’s time to cast off the last of these ancient shackles, and allow Ireland to be as unique as its people have always been.

Hence yes, I will vote YES and YES, because both changes offer less offence than the previous arcane options.


 

©Charlie Adley
03.03.2024


Sunday 18 February 2024

Less Top Gun - more Top Bum!


 
One white smear on the ground outside my front door. A few small grey splashes on Joey SX’s windscreen.

Small time poopers but sure signs: Shitting Season has begun.

On census night in 2022 I decided to do my own survey of the local population. Walking around this patch of land I counted seventy two rook nests; magnificent creations, huge and sturdy, swaying high in the soaring old ash trees.

Years ago, when I lived on the shores of Lough Corrib, there was a house a mile away, surrounded by crows nest. As I drove past each day I felt a macabre shiver run through me, and gave thanks that I didn’t live so close to that constant cacophonous crawking.

‘Couldn’t live there.’ I thought to myself. ‘It’d just be way too depressing.’

Life is constantly surprising, and clichés such as ‘Needs must, when the devil drives’ exist for a reason.

In the Spring of 2021, recovering from a life-threatening illness, major surgery and my second house eviction in three years, I had no savings, was too unwell to work, and even if I’d had money, there were no places to rent post-Covid anyway.

It was one of my darkest hours, yet the universe provided: I was rescued by a friend who offered me this place as a refuge.

As I moved my boxes into my new home I stopped to look up at the rook-ridden trees. An excellent friend who was helping me move gave wise counsel:

“You’ll have to either phase ‘em out or get into ‘em, because they’re going nowhere.”

Between March and June, when Shitting Season is at full splat, you cannot help but feel besieged. By then the birds have built their stupendous nests and hatched their babies, and any feeble-minded notion of sharing the patch with feathery friends disappears.

Any hippyish souls who insist the cwooty wooty birdies are not attacking on purpose, I challenge to stand out there for five minutes.

It’s made extremely clear that humans who live here are nothing but invaders in their territory. We are not welcome, so near to their chicks.

Both our cars become covered in guano, to the point where windscreen washers and wipers do not suffice. Truly Disgusting with a capital D. My front door and windows are splattered and squelched with shit.

In order to hit the exterior of my gaff, deliberate and highly skilful feats of dive-bombing are performed.

Last year the Tom Cruise of the local rook community managed to score a direct lumpy gooey hit on the little square window in my front door. To achieve this, they’d have had to fly low and then shoot up vertically at the very last minute.

Not so much Top Gun as Top Bum.

During Shitting Season we are considered Legitimate Targets if we dare walk anywhere in the vicinity, which proves problematic as I pay my rent by gardening.

On rare and wondrous blue sky Spring days, I am to be found with the hood up on an old anorak, watering or weeding as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Hurrying inside feeling relieved that I escaped their pooh, I discover - in a thoroughly unhygienic and squelchy way - the vile goo on the back lower leg of my jeans.

How the hell did they manage that?
Yuk yuk bloody yuk.
And Grrrr.

Phase ‘em out or get in to ‘em, eh? I dare you to achieve either during Peak Shit, but when their babies have fully fledged, sometime around the end of July, they shut the fuck up.

 

Oh.

 

Shit free silence.

 

A few weeks of dozing off in my chair outside, delirious in the afternoon sunshine, bewitched only by the buzz of bees.

From Autumnal to Vernal equinox, Chas’ Caff is open for business. A restaurant that pops-up wherever I live, it supplies seed each morning to the local bird community.

I tried the bird-feeder tree hangers, but within minutes the seed was all spilled out by clever crows, so I gauge how much seed my local gang can chow daily, and throw less on the ground, leaving nothing for the rats.

A constant throughout my life,I glean such joy from this simple activity. I’ve about fifteen hedge sparrows, some blue tits, yellow tits (no great or crested though) and two redbreast robins, who both fly in to my call:

“Mister Robiiiiiiiin….”

 There are finches of many colours, and Mr and Mrs. Blackbird, who delight in taking a bath in the water bowls I put out.  On occasion my group is joined by a plump pheasant, stunning in his rainbow finery.

Last Spring a pair of collared doves visited daily, and in Autumn there appeared five more, the image of the adult collareds, save for a lack of collars.

My wise friend explained that these were juveniles; maybe even one or two broods fed by the pair of adults who’d dined at my caff. Indeed, as this Winter progressed into Spring, I saw the gradual arrival of greeny-black collars growing on the young ones, so that they were becoming hard to tell apart from their parents.

Late arrivals at Chas' Caff: adult collared dove, young 'un with only a tiny bit of collar, a few sparrows and a rook...

They show their auld folks no respect. There is mayhem aplenty as all seven fight over the food. The sparrows seems more placid and peace-loving, while the tits and robins are vicious, often spending more time attacking each other than eating the seed.

The whole bunch have developed some kind of pavlovian response to the sound of my kitchen tap. They know I will go outside a few times as I clean out the fire and empty the ash, so they wait until I start the dishes to plunge down and feast.

Recently I’ve noticed that they’re all waiting in the shrubs as I emerge in the morning. Now that it’s light by eight, it appears to them that breakfast is late, their circadian rhythms frustrated by my adherence to human time.

Much as I love my birdy crew, I’m not sure that I’d choose to live surrounded by seventy two rook nests.

However, doing that has been a revelation. I’ve happily adapted to a situation that, in the past, I’d sworn I couldn’t cope with.

Life is constantly surprising. At the tender range of 63, I’m delighted to discover I’m capable of far greater acceptance than I ever imagined.

Where other creatures’ lives interact with my own, I now know that all is possible, as long as you don’t try to rule the roost.



©Charlie Adley
18.02.2024



Thursday 11 January 2024

Thank you Winter. Don’t listen to the others. I love you.

 

Waking to the sound of no rain hammering my bedroom windows, I turn on the lamp.

6:43

Above me silence reigns, where last week the wind played a violin concerto, as waves of rain smashed violently onto the roof. 

The mighty old ash trees that surround me here reveal by the pitch of their howl the energy of the storm. 

I see stars through the velux window.

Splendid.

Clear means icy, frosty, the end of the nasturtiums at last. 

There are countless downsides to being a writer, but having to get out of bed while it’s still dark isn’t one of them.

Propping up a pillow behind my head I reach for the doorstop of a hardback that has sustained and entertained me for two weeks now.

What luxury!

For years I commuted into London, physically hurling my body at packed tube trains, just as the doors started to close, so that my impact would allow me to squeeze into the space between glass and wedged workers.

No more.
                        

No need, reason or desire to leave the house. Just get up, do my stretches, make a fire, have breakfast and go to my office. There I can sit and write as long as I want to, because outside it’s freezing/lashing/blowing a gale/winter.

Apart from housework, there is nothing else I can do today. 

Good writing weather: that’s what I call it.

Lovely.
                             
God knows what other poor souls who live rural lives do on days like this. Sometimes being a scribbler feels like a blessing, because I’m condemned to neither loneliness nor Loose Women.

Without the writing Winter would send me even more doolally than I already am.

Ireland has produced so many writers, because instead of going on merry social jaunts, we’re forced by the rain to stay inside; to apply our madness to writing.

Others warn me of the dangers of isolation, but I experience way more craziness out there in the human world, than here in my solitude.

Exchanging pleasantries with shop workers or howyas on the street inevitably entails listening to them giving out something rotten about the wind and rain.

They can take the cold, and love the sunshine. Oh they’ll take anything, except that rain, the wind and the rain. They just can’t bear it.

I nod and smile, eager but socially unable to moan back at them:

“Well why the bloody hell do you live here then, in this country famed for wind and rain? Move to Morocco. But no, ‘cos once it gets above 20 degrees you’re giving out like babies that it’s fearful hot. And as for humid, well believe me, what you call humid in Ireland truly isn’t.”

Would you want to sit there and tell me you hate a quarter of your life?

Well then, don’t give out about the only Irish season that does what it says on the calendar.
                        
In Winter we can enjoy each day’s sunrise and sunset. With the sun so low on the horizon, the heavens offer severe contrasts and jaw-dropping colours.

Shafts of fire and crimson shoot from both dawn and dying sun, up into black clouds bulging with rain. The light and dark bleed together, mutating into a menacing purple glow, intense with latent power. 

As the sun creeps along its low Winter horizon it lights up the empty branches of trees.

The best of Winter comes not with what is, but what is not.

During the darkest months, while we uncivilised beasts rush around in festive frenzy, arrogantly believing ourselves immune to mammalian hibernation, the natural world becomes calm.

Stand still for only a few minutes each day and you’ll discover how in Winter our environment exists in a variety of silences, offering the bliss of several levels of peace. 

At Winter dusk there are no power tools; not even birdsong here.

Not a sound; not a movement; not a car in the distance nor a ram at a ewe. 

A majestic calm hangs over the land. Away from war and Christmas shopping, here right now, at our feet, the world is placid. 

With shorter days I sleep more and try to expect less of myself. A very fine and fancy shmancy idea, but the outside world (a.k.a. life) always steps in and dictates the rules.

Still, despite the trials and challenges life presents, which as we all know it does, relentlessly, I make sure to give thanks for Winter.

 
When the trees are still, silent and naked, I enjoy nothing more than standing by the back door, watching the birds eat the seeds I’ve strewn.

Oh wow!

A young fox appears, not 20 feet from me.

Robust with health in his lush rusty coat, he licks up a few mouthfuls of birdseed and jumps over the stone wall. 

The weather forecast unfolds over my house.
I take time to appreciate the glorious tranquillity.  

I like to stand on the bog road at 8:30 on a January morning, watching the huge sun creep above the hill, slashing the sky so that it bursts a blood red snakeskin pattern above pitch black mountains.

 I love the abruptness of Winter silence.

Trees demand attention: starkly silhouetted inverted lungs, plugged into the planet.

Away over there another fox appears in daylight, because it has to, and I admire the size of this beast, surprisingly brown, with a yard long brush ending in a white bobble.

By god, it’s thriving.

When all the undergrowth is stripped back, Winter allows you to encounter Ireland’s wildlife up close. The pair of herons that in midsummer would have no need to be close to humans now launch themselves out of the drainage ditch up the bog road.

I stop in my tracks as they rip-roar out of the reeds, casually flapping their great dinosaur wings, rising straight up only to settle back down 20 yards away on the bog. 

At midday, dazzled by the low sun, I stand under a deep blue sky, vivid rust bogland to the horizon.

Drinking in the stillness; the only sound a breeze in my ear.

Thank you Winter.

Don’t listen to the others.

I love you.

 

 

 

 

©Charlie Adley

08.01.2024

 

 

Friday 8 December 2023

Fancy a touch of zorbing or wadi bashing?

Time to renew my travel insurance, so online I go to check out a few quotes.

In the past this was pretty simple - around 70 smackers for a worldwide year of insured travel, but well into my 60s, I have several of what insurance types call ‘pre-existing conditions.’

I could of course pretend I don’t, but insurance companies just love not paying out, and I’m buggered if I’m going to give them a chance to nullify a claim.

Say I lost my suitcase and everything therein, but they somehow found out about my dodgy knee.

You could spend several hundred years trying to ascertain what links these two issues, apart from my good self, but link them they will, and then take great pleasure in telling me my policy is invalid.

“But but but my belongings are not lost because I have a torn meniscus!” I cry in outrage.

“Makes no difference, puny human. Be gone before we sue your sorry arse for lying to an insurance company, and oh yes, remember, your call is very important to us."

The initial quote looked very reasonable, but once I’ve told them I had half a lung cut out, and yes, this does affect my breathing, and yes, there’s a couple of other chronic conditions attached to my lungs as well, their premium calculator spins into hyperdrive.

All of a sudden I’m looking at having to fork out several hundred spondoolicks.

As the amount due inflates, so the health issues covered start to shrink. Now they’re saying that they won’t cover me for anything to do with breathing, which includes blood issues, heart issues and, well, y’know, life in general.

Breathing’s pretty high up the old Being Alive Pyramid.

While I wonder why the price is going up at the same time as they’re refusing to pay out for just about everything that might go wrong with a human body, I advance to a page on their website that - s’cuse me - takes my breath away.

We’ve established I’m somewhat limited breathwise, so why on earth are they now asking me if intend to enjoy an insane list of sporting activities on my travels?

Of course it’s reasonable to ask about scuba diving and skiing. Even, at a stretch, not beyond the bounds of possibility I might at some juncture get up on a horse, a camel or even a nellyphant.

But they want to know if I’m planning to attempt any of the following:

Assault course.

Breathing observation bubble diving, maximum depth 30 metres, under 14 days.                                                                                  
(What even is that??)

Paragliding.

Parachuting.

Parapenting.
(Parapenting? Answers on a postcard please!)

Ostrich riding.
(Really? I mean really? Have they seen me? Well, no, obviously not, but I have never met anyone who has wanted to ride an ostrich, or even talked of or mentioned in passing a penchant for ostrich riding.) 

Manual labour at ground level, no machinery or power tools.           
(On holiday? Why why why?)

Canyon Swinging.
(Errrm, wot? Does that mean Tarzanning across the canyon, or having sex with the neighbours near a canyon?)

Dragon boating.
(See above re: Errrm wot?)

Gorge swinging.
(More outdoor nookie?)

Hydro speeding.
(Perchance taking amphetamines while underwater?)

Mud buggying.
(Yet again, no idea)

Tree top walking
(Or any other supernatural or Jesus-like activities…?)

Wadi bashing.
(Beating up a dried-up river bed? Why? Is that really a thing? That river bed has done nothing to me. I mean no harm to dried-up river beds. I’m a lover not a basher.)

And finally…

Zorbing.
(Is that the opposite of absorbing?)

I could look up each sport or activity or whatever the hell Cat Skiing is, just to make sure I won’t be doing it by accident on my travels, but hey, you know, life’s too short, especially with all my pre-existing conditions.

Clearly there are people out there who like nothing better on holiday than a few hours manual labour after a good morning’s ostrich riding.

If you ever meet one whilst enjoying a bit of Zorbing, please let me know.


©Charlie Adley
08.12.2023



Wednesday 6 December 2023

Two questions every writer should ask!


 
 
Having respectively won and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I’m certain that Pauls Lynch and Murray will not lose sleep over my criticism.

I’m aware that neither author will pay the slightest heed to my opinion, but that’s never going to stop me saying how I feel.

As a vocational writer who’s made a living for three decades from his scribbling, I have the right to say what I think.

Truth is we all do. That’s what’s so great about the Arts. All opinions are important.

I finished reading Prophet Song a week before it won the Booker Prize. Although it offers more than a pure thriller, its greatest quality is that it is thrilling.

Lynch builds a terrifyingly credible justifiably paranoid 21st century Dublin, and although the political undertones are fascinating, the story sticks to the war narrative like hot tyres on molten asphalt.

Personally I would’ve liked more backstory of how this rightwing autocracy gained power, but that would be a different book.

I did however reach that wonderful point in a reader’s relationship with their book, when I looked forward to going to bed so that I could rejoin the story.

As the book that Lynch wanted to write, it was almost perfect, except for the writer’s refusal to hit return on the keyboard, so that we might know who is talking to whom at all times.

Ever since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the absence of quotation marks and character identifiers (he whispered, she said) has become de rigueur dwaaahhlinng for the Literati.

So eager are some authors to write in a fashionable style, they forget to ask themselves the two questions every writer must ask, when considering a narrative device of any kind:

Does it work?

and

Is it necessary?

Students on my Craft of Writing Course inevitably ask

“Charlie, can I do ‘this’?”

or

“Is ‘that’ allowed?”

to which I always reply

“You can do anything you want, as long as it works.”

The decision about whether the device is necessary comes only after it has been proven to work. When I read McCarthy’s The Road I never had any doubts who was saying what to whom.

Not only did his decision to omit punctuation work, it actually enhanced the reading of what was, essentially a double-header between father and son.

We knew who they were and had no need for identifiers or quotation marks.

It worked, and it was necessary.

When Paul Lynch decided to do away with paragraphs, quotation marks and identifiers, he did his book no favours.

As a reader, I want to be utterly engaged at all times. I want to feel sucked whole into this world on the pages in front of me, enveloped by the author's thoughts, dreams, rhythms and feelings.

I don’t want to be aware I’m on the bus or in bed, reading. I want to be there, in the book, seduced by beautiful simple stunning prose.

What I do not want is to have to read a sentence twice to understand its context, or to revisit a paragraph, so that I can work out who’s talking, when their speech ends and at which point it’s replaced by a narrative voice. 

Does it work?
Yes, it works. It’s stumbling and inelegant, but it works. 

Is it necessary? Does it enhance the reading of the book?
Absolutely not, in any way.

Welcome to the perilous territory of ‘Art with a Capital F’ wherein the writer considers how the book is written to be more important than how it is read.

Whilst busy criticising other scribblers, I’ll now take the risk of disappearing up my own hole, by quoting from the introduction to my Craft of Writing Course:

'Never write to impress.
Never try to appear clever.'

Prophet Song is an outstanding book. I was gripped, and felt sad when I finished it. Very possibly Mr. Lynch employed his block narrative style to create a sense of claustrophobia in his reader.

He underestimates us, and the power of his own language. The device was not necessary. It just felt he was trying to be clever, to write Literature, and in the process forced me to feel disengaged, thrust out of the book, time and time again.

Had he not tried to be clever, it would have read so much better. Just my opinion, for which I make no excuses. I can’t read it as you.

What a joy it was then, to pick up The Bee Sting and encounter simple, hilarious and knowing prose.

What a relief. 

So accessible was Murray’s narrative that I felt my criticism of Prophet Song (oh but how I loathe this word) validated

From Son to Daughter we stray, and then to the voice of Imelda, the Mother and oh, Lordy Miss Maudy, Murray’s at it too.

Maybe he's using the device to portray how frantic and non-stop Imelda is, so her passages have no quotation marks, although, strangely, they do have identifiers. 

Equally odd, while there are no paragraphs, there is a capital letter at the start of each sentence, even though there’s no full stop/period before it, to announce the end of the previous sentence.

It’s a kind of mish-mash half-arsed version of the style employed in Prophet Song and several other contemporary novels. 

Tragically, yet again, it adds nothing to the book, and serially breaks my engagement with the narrative, as I reread a few lines for clarity.

Yet again a talented writer tries something he believes to be clever, underestimating both his readers and his own skills.

Nevertheless I’m thoroughly enjoying the book, and hoping that when we reach the Father character, we’ll be back to using paragraphs, punctuation and all that standard stuff…

... unless Murray tries something else that works, which proves necessary and keeps me more engaged as a reader than ever before

 
 
 
 
©Charlie Adley

06.12.2023