Happy Paddy's Day and 25 years of friendship!

It’s lunchtime on St. Patricks Day, 2001, and I’m sitting at the bar of the Anchor Pub in Killala, enjoying Sean the landlord’s icicle sharp sandpaper dry wit.

I’ve only been living here for a couple of months, yet even by my own introverted sociopathic standards I’ve barely left my new home, because there hangs in the air the terrible threat of Foot and Mouth disease.

Along with the Six Nations Rugby tournament, Paddy’s Day parades have been cancelled.

Even though the Celtic Tiger cub is firing up my freelance writing career very nicely, Ireland is still an agricultural economy. Silicon Bog is yet to rise from the mist of corporate tax evasion. If livestock are slaughtered on an industrial scale, local livelihoods will be devastated.

How much do I want to be the Englishman who brought Foot and Mouth disease to the Irish Republic?

So I’ve been resisting the urge to walk long and far, yet staying inside has been such a challenge for me, because North Mayo, my new home, has the lot: rolling green pasture and barren ancient bog; drumlins and mountains; flatlands and cliffs; subterranean galleries and ancient abbeys.

I’d fallen in love with its unique seascapes. So many white sand beaches are untouched by mass tourism, while at Downpatrick Head there are blowholes and the astonishing sea stack, Dun Briste, a sight that never fails to make my jaw drop.

Sipping my whiskey, dreaming of day I can walk freely in my new environment, I spot a bearded gent down the other end of the bar.

It’s early yet, so the pub is empty, save for us two and Sean. While living in Galway City I’d learned the hard way that Paddy’s Day is rather like New Year’s Eve: a messy event full of drunk people who are not used to drinking, overdoing it because they feel they have to.

Mr. Beardy and I start chatting, and as I sit here, 25 years later to the day, we haven’t stopped.

On that Paddy’s Day he explained that his family had arrived in the area only a few months before me, and over the next few weeks he introduced me to several other families of Blow-Ins who’d also recently arrived.

Tragically since then we have lost four wonderful souls to cancer, but that has served only to strengthen our bonds.

My friend and I share a passion for nature. We love to grown plants, study animals and stare at the night sky, wondering at the beauty of it all.

He has since graduated with a degree as a local guide, now expert in local geography, history, topography, geology, folklore, music and culture. To walk along a beach with him is a privilege.

His passion for our local flora and fauna bursts out as he grabs bunches of seaweed off the rocks, explaining how it contains all the minerals that made life possible. Then his head dives down to the sand, where a pinprick hole lures him to dig with his fingers, all the way up to his elbow, until he withdraws his arm clutching a lunch of razor clams. 

Over the quarter century of our friendship, life and death have visited us both in most challenging ways, yet we have survived, and occasionally thrived, if not in riches then in laughter.

The man is notorious for his tangential ramblings. He makes Billy Connolly appear succinct and to the point. However I’ve learned through my wild and wonderful life that rather than loving perfection, it’s our foibles, faults and fractures we humans truly love.

His wonderful wife and I have our own friendship, but on occasion we’ve further bonded at my friend’s expense, in that when he’s off on a verbal trek, we circle around his story, rather like jackals hunting prey.

Will he ever get to the point?
Do we even care?

On one most memorable occasion my friend and I had greeted a sunny Summer afternoon by chatting and laughing and drinking a little. Then we visited the village and had another little talk and a laugh and a drink.

Later we returned to his home where I watched as he fed the children and put them to bed. Then we had a little drink, a laugh and talked until his wife returned from work. Then we sat, talked, laughed and drank some more.

As the heat from the coal and wood roasting in their huge fireplace rose into the room and fuelled our hearts, the standards of conversation tumbled.

By this time all those little drinkies have combined as one. My friend's’ wife and I are mercilessly mocking himself, with all his wandering tangential amorphous storytellings.

He raises his hands to protest:

“Now now now!” he bellows, eager to plead his case. “All seriousness aside!” says he, blissfully unaware of the wee verbal slip that has caused us, his audience, to fall physically from our chairs in inebriated mirth.

Thinking back now, maybe my friend has had the last laugh. Wisdom lurks in his inadvertent and hysterical error.

All seriousness aside? Isn’t that the best advice?

Here’s to the next 25 years, my lovely friends, and happy St. Patrick’s Day to you and all my colyoomistas.
 

 

©Charlie Adley

16.03.2026

Double Vision passed 750,000 hits - thanks to all my colyoomistas!

It's been 33 years and 5 months since Double Vision was born in the Connacht Tribune and Galway City Tribune, with the first colyoom (pictured above) appearing in October 1992, and 19 years 2 months since we went online.

 

Since then there have been 732 posts, 762,953 visits, with 4,450 yesterday and 36,588 this month.

 

Colyoomista activity always rises as we near Paddy's Day, but nevertheless I'm extremely grateful to all of you who have read my blather. 

 

I'll be back in touch when we clear the million mark! Thanks again!

 

Just say it. Months of rain rain rain. We can handle the truth. Unsettled, me hole.

Great artwork from Allan Cavanagh of caricatures-ireland.com

Every Saturday I take my sabbath.
I don’t have to do my stretches.
I don’t have to exercise.

I can eat whatever I want, yet must cook as little as possible.
I go out for my Full Irish on Saturday morning and in the evening I shove something into the microwave. 

Yes, a dreaded UPF dinner for me, and that’s okay.
It’s my day off.

Wouldn’t want you to think that makes life simple. Doing exactly what I want is way more complex than simply doing nothing.

The Ireland England ruby match is about to start, and I’ll watch that with full sound and vision until half time, when I have to mute the TV so’s I can listen to the Chelsea commentary on my phone.

All good and eminently doable, until I send a text to my mate JB, saying I’m having a busy lazy rainy day.

This is when being a vocational writer becomes a bit of a pain. My so-called ‘calling’ hears Busy Lazy Rainy Day in capital letters: a working title, very probably a headline for a piece, ‘cos yeh, I’ve been meaning to scribble something new for a while.

Right now though there’s the rugby, which stretches my love and loyalty between my home nation and the nation I call my home. Unless it ends in an honourable tie, part of me will win that game and part of me will lose it.

The Blues playing Burnley doesn’t stretch my loyalty at all.

My writer thing knows there’s no better time than right now to put that thought down.

In fact, if I don’t turn the stream of thought that followed the idea into notes or better, a first draft, any potential will diminish; might be forgotten.

Do it now!
Engrained in my DNA after living off my blather for so long. Do it now!

There’s the rugby, the footie, and the laundry- oh! Didn't I mention that I chose my day off to do the laundry too? There’ll be drum-spinning ear-shattering whining splicing the air in a minute - oh, no, right now in fact.

Just before kick off. Not too bad. I’ll sort those clothes out at half time, before the Chelsea kick off. 

And there I am, on my day off, writing mental lists.
To Do lists.
Worse. Unnecessary To Do lists.
Chronological blah blah.

Having laid out my clean clothes on driers I reject the matches, the laundry the whole damn doodad that had me writing mental lists.

I go outside and stand in the rain. Mental behaviours, some might say.
I beg to differ. Busy Lazy Rainy Day. I’ve been busy and lazy and it’s been raining for several centuries now, or so it seems.

Relentless dancing drops hitting my mypex, standing pools of water on drenched clogged ground.

Juicy big wet-making raindrops slick through my hair. I can feel my jeans soaking in the rainspray drenching given by the wind.

Pneumonia beckons. Communing with nature is great and all that, but I like breathing too, so I go inside and watch the drops dance on the pavement.

Rain: saviour of Ireland. Rain that keeps our clifftops free from hotels, our beaches empty and clean, our fields full of flowers and our pasture rich and deep.

Alongside the absolute certainty of rain here on the edge of the mighty Atlantic the only other thing I can guarantee is that every local soul will utter some form of weather assessment thus:

“I don’t mind if it’s cold/hot/windy/foggy/frosty as long as it’s not raining. That’s the thing. Long as it’s not raining.”

After 34 years living on Ireland’s west coast I still cannot fathom why people choose to demonise that which they live with each day.
It’s going to rain, so we might as well enjoy it.

Masters of the meteorological euphemism, the English and Irish have created a universe of weather terms that are indecipherable to foreigners, and let's be honest, pretty much incomprehensible to ourselves.

Any ideas just what an 'odd shower' might be? One in which the rain falls upwards?

Anyone know exactly what they mean by bright? Are we talking clouds, sunshine, or what?

And when did the word 'rain' disappear from forecasts, to be replaced with 'unsettled weather'?
It's not unsettled at all.
It's days and days of rain.
Weeks, nay months of rain rain rain.

Just say it baby; we can handle the truth.
Unsettled, me hole.

We do rain in all shapes and sizes: soft; drizzly; damp; showers - but is that occasional showers, frequent showers, constant showers; heavy showers, or prolonged heavy showers?

We have light, moderate and heavy rain, followed by lashing rain and then, Top of the Rain Pops comes sideways rain, which conspires to come at you on gale and storm force winds from the horizontal.

For reasons I’d rather not understand, sideways rain seems to possess some kind of perverted predilection for travelling up inside a coat or even jeans, as if sniffing out your bits.

Not good.

With the coming of spring there arrive the early enquiries from friends for summer visits, asking the inevitable question: "What's the weather like?"

Let me think: what is the weather like? I’ve lived in hot dry places. I’ve lived where the ground moves under your feet, where forests burn, where the winters blow blizzards and snowdrifts.

I’ll admit to being generally happy living between 10 - 20C, or 50 - 60F in the old money.

We rarely have extreme weather here. When we do it’s mostly rain, and we have an extremely large vocabulary with which to describe it.

My own bȇte noir is when the media forecasters show off their state-of-the-art technology by predicting

“Sunshine at times, rain in places.” 

Aaaaarrggghhhhh.

Yes we know.
Times and places.

As opposed to the weather in Black Holes and parallel universes, beyond time and reason.

Maybe, just maybe, one day they’ll share with us which places at what times.

Today To Do lists begone!
I’m watching the rain.


© Charlie Adley
21.02.2026

How many emails for a one night stay?

Your scribbler has been driven somewhat demented over the last two weeks. 

What’s that?
Oh, okay. More demented than usual, as a result of booking a hotel. 

Yep, that’s what I said.

Loyal and very attentive colyoomistas may recall that back in May 2004, I fessed up to being an anonymous reviewer of hotels for quality newspapers (not a tautology!) for over two decades.

Of course, as soon as I did, I had to retire from that particular gig, as in my opinion there is zero point in reviewing an hotel if they know you’re writing a review. All of a sudden you’re in a beautiful room and can I do anything else for you, sir? 

Being a naive fool, I thought that once I’d left the reviewing game, staying in hotels would return to being a pure pleasure.

Someone comes in and makes your bed; gives you new towels, fresh coffee capsules and more putrid cartons of UHT milk.

You fill out and hang the breakfast menu on your room’s door handle and lo, at 08:30 there’s a knock and a young man is delivering your scrambles and bacon, tea and toast.

In sad little Adley world, that’s pretty close to as good as it gets. 

And yes, I do still love staying in hotels, but that pleasure is now mitigated by the onslaught of bollocky emails that one has to endure when booking a room these days.

A couple of weeks ago, being ever-so-slightly brassic, I decided to make the most of the current price of gold by flogging a few small items I inherited from my grandparents.

An antique auctioneer advised me that yes, he could put one or two of my items into an auction, but I’d wait months for the correct collectors sale day, and then pay him a commission. 

In a rare display of altruism, he advised me that I’d be better off going to a particular shop he knew in Dublin, mentioning his name and getting a fair price for the gold weight of the lot, there and then, in cash. 

You can take the boy out of London, but you can’t take London out of the boy.

Cash?
A wad?
Yessirrreeee! 

Well, if I’m headed to Dublin, I might as well make a night of it, I decided.

I’ve been at home since before Christmas, so a night away from my own cooking and dishes would be most welcome.

Over those 20 years of reviewing I learned that the first stop in any hotel search should be the hotel’s website. The prices offered on their own sites are often very competitive with third party bookers, like Booking.com, Trivago and Expedia.

If you’re offered a bargain elsewhere, contact the hotel and tell them. See how quickly they offer you the same discount.

This is presuming you’ve chosen an independent and ideally family-run hotel (like my West of Ireland favourites: Flannerys in Galway City and Rosleague Manor in Connemara), which is where I’d head every day of the week.

Trouble is, in Dublin ,all the choices were corporate chains, so I booked a room in an apart-hotel, close to the shop that I was aiming for. 

All was good.
Here’s the email confirming my booking.
Perfect. 

Here’s another email, telling me to make the most of my trip, and what’s available in the area.
Erm, that’s fine, I s’pose.

Here’s another email. 

Do you want to upgrade your room? 

I feel my inner grumpy git awake from surly slumber.

No I don’t want a bloody upgrade.
Stop it. Go away.
Leave me alone.

If I wanted a better room, I’d’ve booked a better room. I’d been to their website, looked on Booking, read reviews on Tripadvisor and made what a pretentious prat might call an ‘educated choice.’

Oh for god’s sake, it’s only an hotel room.
Let’s not get carried away.

Then I receive yet another email, written in what I can only assume is a style they believe Millennials or Gen Zees might find amusing.

It went 100% like this, in tone and format; I kid ye not:

“Hey Charlie
Whoop!
Whoop
doopy
doopy
doo!

We are so excited to see you.

 

It’s great you booked with us.

We’re so excited about your stay.
Yippee
Yippee
Aye ayyyy...”
 

As I read this nonsensical sycophantic drivel, my grumpy git engine moved rapidly up through the gears into overdrive, outrage and disbelief, but that wasn’t the end of it.

The very next day I received yet another email. The fifth for a one night booking. 

Do you want to bid for a room upgrade? 

You wot? Is this an effin’ joke?

Do I want to BID for a room upgrade? 

Yeh, sure, of course I do, ‘cos my life is so crushingly empty I can think of no better way to spend my valuable yet vacant time than competing with other sad losers in a fight to give you more money for something I don’t even want and grrrr and grrrowl and roaaaarrr and - 

I suddenly started coughing, instantly recognising the bad taste in my mouth as evidence of a nascent chest infection. 

Given that half of Ireland was at that moment laid up with respiratory viruses, and my 1.5 very scarred lungs must be maintained with respect, I grabbed the chance to postpone my trip to Dublin and cancel my room.

Another email. 

Would you like to take a survey, to share your reasons why you cancelled your room? 

Would I? 

In the modern language of hotel reservations:

Yabba dabba dooby dooo! 

Hold me back and allow me to explain why to you!

 

©Charlie Adley

21.01.2025
 

“Move over girls - I’m coming in!”

It wasn't these two....

It’s 1981 and your scribbler is a 21 year-old hedonist, driving south from my flat in Cambridge to my friend’s house in South Harrow.

We’ll call him Dave, to protect the less-than-innocent.

The world is not yet under the censorious yoke of Woke, and my militant feminism will not peak for another three years.

If you’re easily offended stop reading now, for this is a tale of drug taking and wanton behaviour.

As it should in all things nostalgic, the sun shines from a cloudless blue sky as I speed along, excited at the prospect of delivering my cargo.

Dave has never taken an acid trip, so I’m heading south to deliver blotters for both of us. I know he’ll be excited and trepidatious about it all, probably pacing up and down his living room, waiting for my arrival.

I feel calm and confident about the next 24 hours, as I’m very familiar with LSD, and I’ve known Dave all of my life.

I can see only fun times ahead, and hey, look over there. Two young females hitchhiking, so of course I stop to pick them up.

They both have roughly the same body mass: the shorter one a curvaceous beauty; the taller a gorgeous Amazonian. Both sport blonde hair, the shorter woman’s styled in a bob, the taller worn long and flying free, like ripe wheat in a breeze.

They wedge their smiling faces through the open passenger window.

“Hey ladies! Where are you going?”

“Er em sort of towards London, but we don’t know exactly, I think.”

“Well jump in then! I’m going to London too!”

They both sit in the back of the car, which makes me feel a little like a chauffeur. In my rear view mirror I see two suntanned faces, with Hollywood white teeth shining from broad relaxed smiles.

“So where are you from?”

“Oh we are from Denmark.” replies the shorter one.

“Lovely. And what do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Oh no, not at all. We are both nurses, yes?” answers the taller one.

My lack of naming them is in no way a device to dehumanise them. If anything, it’s a sign of respect. For the life of me, 45 years later, I can’t remember either of their names, and it would feel glib and ignorant to simply christen them Anni-Frid and Agnetha, so forgive me.

They talk almost perfect English, with only the slightest and most charming hint of a foreign accent.

“So what’s your plan, ladies? Where are you headed?”

“Well really we don’t know. Just towards London and sort of see what happens, kind of thing, you know.”

These two are humans after my own heart. I’ve hitched for years with just such a mindset.

“Well, I’m heading down to a northern suburb, to stay with a friend of mine. You’re very welcome to come along.”

In my mirror I see two faces turn to look at each other, and eyebrows raising in pairs.

“Sure, that sounds great. Thank you. Will be nice to stay in real London house.”

Oh so they’re staying, are they? I think of the grill pan down there, with weeks of bacon fat festering in it, and the loo where, oh, you don’t need to know.

“Well, erm, it’s not very glamorous. There’s three friends of mine living there, all lads, so it’s not the cleanest place in the world.”

“Cool. Real, like we said. Better than a Youth Hostel, I think."

“Anything anywhere is better than a Youth Hostel!” I cry, and we all laugh in accord.

I shove Hunky Dory into the cassette player and turn up the volume.

Okay, so I’m arriving on Dave’s doorstep with a sheet of blotters and two Danish nurses. Haven’t seen a camera anywhere, but this doesn’t half sound like a classic porn movie.

Dave is, as anticipated, twitching with nerves about the impending trip. He shows his unexpected guests to the spare room, and comes into the living room, where I’m rolling a fat one.

“What the fuck, Charlie!”

“Just a little hors d’oeuvres, Davie, to chill you out before the trip.”

“No, I‘m not talking about the joint. I mean the ... the … who are they?”

I shrug.

 “Dunno mate. They’re lovely and they’re happy to be here, so what’s the prob? They know what we’re doing today, and they’re happy to just hang here in the house. Been on the road for months, apparently, so it’s nice for them to have a bath, and a kitchen to use, and, well, y’know.”

This, beloved Colyoomistas, is where my memory becomes unreliable, to the point of non-existence. We take the blotters and endure an hour or so of Dave going

“Is it working yet? Is it working yet?”

To which I offer

“Mate, when it starts working you won’t have to ask.”

I remember us leaving the house. Despite my advice to the contrary, Dave insists on driving his flash Lancia as the acid kicks in, so that he can emulate Hunter S. Thompson, which makes me Dr. Gonzo.

After that I have only the vaguest flash of an image, involving me and him standing on the walkway bridge over the tube line at Northwood Station, both of us wearing full face crash helmets while brandishing a stick and an axe at each other.

The other six hours are gone forever, and then we’re back in the house. Dave is having his first experience of acid comedown. Not unpleasant, to me it feels like I’m floating on a small rowing boat, but poor Dave doesn’t feel great, so he announces he’s off to bed.

All of a sudden I’m alone in his living room, high as a constellation and wondering where I’m going to sleep.

As I wander round downstairs I realise the place is immaculate. The girls have cleaned the entire place. Amazing. Fantastic. What lovely people they are.

Thing is though, they’re sleeping in the double bed that I usually crash in.

The following events I only know because Dave told me about them the next morning. After waking he went downstairs, following a trail of my clothes, from my socks and underwear on the upstairs landing, to jeans on the stairs and my T-shirt on the living room carpet.

Apparently, a few minutes after he went to bed, he heard me knocking on the spare room door, opening it and exclaiming

“Move over girls - I’m coming in!”

Tragically my memory returns only as I awake to daylight.

I’m in the middle of that double bed, the naked meat in a naked blonde Scandi sandwich. Clearly I hadn’t offended our guests in any way, as they were both asleep, curled into and around me in sublime fleshy hugs.

As I move, as the tall one wakes up too. Gracefully sliding out of the bed she stretches her long golden arms to the ceiling, as she slips on her T-shirt.

My god but she is magnificent.

“I’m going to make some coffee. Would you like some coffee?” she asks, as if this is how we all awake every day.

“That sounds great! Thanks."

By now the shorter one is awake too. She smiles as she gives me a big squeezy hug, and heads off to the bathroom.

I lie there in wonder. I realise that this is probably going to be the only time in my life I wake up between two beautiful women, and yet I have zero recall of anything happening the night before.

I very much doubt that anything did, but I will never know. I do feel a purely sensory memory of jumping and then flying through the air and landing on the middle of that double bed, which ties in with what Dave heard me yell, but beyond that: zip, nada, nowt.

We four drink our coffees in that spotless living room, and then they thank us both profusely for our hospitality and leave to explore the West End.

Dave and I look at each other.

“Bloody hell, Charlie!”

“What?”



©Charlie Adley
16.01.2026.