Half a million readers: they can’t all be wrong - and that's just online since 2007.
Double Vision ran in physical newspapers from 1992-2019. Other works here include features from the Irish Times, Irish Examiner and Irish Post, with a shmattering of fiction and autofiction.
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Fall, 1998. We’re walking through San Francisco’s Marina District. My beautiful friend Meg stops, turns to face me, upright in relaxed yoga goddess style, Scandi bob and shardic blue eyes.
“Here’s what I don’t get. You spent all those years travelling around, living all over, looking for somewhere that felt like your home. And then you finally found it. And then you left it.“
I stare down at the sidewalk.
Beneath lies the wreckage of the 1906 quake. The Marina was built on top of and out of that rubble, so these sterile mansions have foundations as precarious as their millionaire owners. The Marina is incubating the gentrification that has destroyed the Bay Area’s liberal artistic heritage.
None of us like being delivered harsh truths about ourselves. Life decisions are built on strata more complex than one simple fact.
Yes, I loved Ireland and I left Ireland, because I loved her more.
No it didn’t work out, but The Beatles lied. Love is not all you need.
You need a home.
A year before I left Ireland for California, I felt my first explosion of joy. I didn't realise, but before I moved to that tiny house in Connemara, I’d felt at best happiness.
In that house in Connemara I felt joy and it was dangerous and powerful and it made me stop and breathe different as I walked.
A home.
A house.
A house on my own.
A house on my own in the place I love.
Off the road.
The ocean on three sides and a lake behind.
Less than two miles from the shop and pub.
My god but I loved her.
That’s why I left my home. Yet America was never home; not mine. You know it’s home when it feels like you’re swimming with the tide.
In America I discovered how it feels when the tide goes against me, and after 4 years I broke.
Came back to Ireland.
Back to Galway.
I'd never been back anywhere, but went back to Galway three times.
That was my second time back, and the most extraordinary of them all; stronger and stranger than the first, because I was utterly committed to her and it and us and never envisaged any return.
Before Ireland I’d lived (earned a wage) all over North West London, in Cambridge, Bradford, Melbourne, Barcelona and Otaki.
As a teenager I’d felt at home hitching around the baked landscapes of rural France. I loved the long green avenues, the peeling plaster rustic walls, the plat du jour and carafe. At 17 I reckoned I’d probably live there as an adult.
A village somewhere.
On Friday 10th April 1992, the day after the Tory’s fourth successive general election victory, I went to to the local travel agent and asked for the cheapest one-way ticket out of the country.
Malaga, £39. That’ll do nicely. Check out Granada, up to Barcelona for their incredible Olympics, and then let the road lead me to my French village.
I make no apologies for sounding a tad hippy dippy. I’ve hitched to the moon and I trust the road.
End of.
JB still talks about the Road To Vic. After he nobly hosted me throughout that outstanding Barcelona summer (JB might well choose a different adjective) he drove me all the way out of the city to a motorway junction, concrete underpass glowing pink pumping 45°C, and left me roadside with the dust and Blue Bag.
At last, my French life awaited, but the road had other plans.
Saturday night I slept out on the lush long grass of French Pyrenean foothills, to awake covered in mountain dew.
Heavy dew for a heavy Jew puns aside, I knew Sunday was a terrible day to hitch, with families packing cars and Grandma behind the wheel for her one drive a week.
Perfect. I was in no rush. I’d stick to D roads, avoiding anything with a hard shoulder and HGVs.
I’d meander and -
and that night I was in Rennes, way up in Brittany. Every lift had rushed me North. Instead of my desired dawdle, I’d dashed through to plans anew.
Much as I love Brittany, if I’m moving to France I’m going to warmer climes, somewhere south of a line from the Vendée to Dijon.
I loved the irony of going around the planet twice and ending up in the country next door, of which I knew nada zip.
Disembarking at Cobh, walking through the streets of Cork City on a damp August afternoon, I was excited that I knew nobody.
I didn’t have a single connection to this new country, this final country, this country that really had to become my home, otherwise I’d be back where I bloody started.
I had no idea.
No idea how madly I would love Ireland and the compassion of the Irish. No idea how I would rip the skin off a tiny slice of Galway life in the early ‘90s, and fall deeply in love with Connemara: my soul’s home.
Then yes, I left, as we established, but I came home, and knew I was home because I had left and grieved and mourned.
I moved to live the second time in a house on my own, this time by a river in Killala, where I felt joy for the second time in my life.
Years later, back to Galway and married again, but in 2018 that all fell apart in crushingly unwelcome circumstances.
The following year I fell apart physically. Not enough there’s a global pandemic. Oh no. His Maj here has to develop an incredibly dangerous, ridiculously rare bacterial infection that tried to kill me several ways.
It started off with pleurisy and double pneumonia, and then there were months of empyema, with a litre and a half of pus in my chest cavity. Then I was coughing up blood.
Despite the best care and a zillion scans they didn’t know what was wrong with me (who does?) so they cut off half a lung to find out, and then there was another year of intense treatment, that involved giving myself intravenous antibiotics at home, with a van driving up from Galway weekly, delivering fresh medicines.
During this time I was also trying to deal with a divorce, a complete loss of income, my life savings already gone on keeping us afloat years before, and an eviction notice given on the day I was told about my lung surgery.
Didn’t have to make it up. Dark would be an understatement. I joked that if reincarnation is real, I must’ve been some special kind of arsehole in a previous life.
My friend in Killala offered me her stable conversion, and that was my home for four years. Were it not for her I would’ve had nowhere to live.
Nowhere.
I couldn’t pay rent, even if there had been anywhere to rent, which there was not.
She saved me, and then four months ago, Mayo County Council offered me a home.
A one bedroom bungalow in a quiet estate 300 yards from the village centre.
A place of my own.
A place where I can stay.
Joy.
Ireland became my home, and now Ireland has given me a home.
No greater gift to this scribbler.
Thank you.
©Charlie Adley
12.04.2025
