More from the DV archive never before seen online. Here comes 1994, Part 1. Enjoy!
February 1994.
I’m sitting on a loo in a B&B in Clifden, but I am not alone. There on the window sill is a little plastic female doll who is wearing a long woollen skirt.
She stares at me with a certain dignity in her eyes, which is somewhat surprising, considering the fact that her skirt is stretched out, over and down the spare roll of loo paper.
There is something plainly disturbing about people who feel the need to hide lavatory paper in decorative nicnacs. It is bourgeois and hypocritical.
There are, no doubt, some among us who pass only perfumed wind and delicate stools shaped like handmade Belgian chocolates, but most of us are willing to accept that bodily functions are not clean and tidy matters.
We know it’s a messy business, and we need to use toilet paper, which when unused is doubtless the least offensive part of the entire process.
So why on earth is there something in the minds of 60-something women that requires the disguising of the clean spare roll?
I know that it’s not right to mess around with other people’s things, but the lines of ownership waver a little when you pay for a room for a night. Picking her up, I’m delighted to find out that she is not just half a doll, but a whole female of the plastic world.
Mercilessly, I plunge her head down into the spare roll, folding her skirt inside-out over the pink paper sheets.
As a protest it’s fairly pathetic, but the end result brings a smile to my lips. The loo roll is now protected by two long plastic legs.
Indeed, they are ever-so slightly parted, leaving just enough room to rest my cigarette during my ablutions.
My companion is concerned by my childish behaviour. What if we are turned out into the cold February streets?
She is showing understandably nervous reactions, given the day we've just endured.
We awoke earlier that morning to find Connemara glazed by Winter sunshine. A wicked frost the night before had left the air chilled to perfection.
A day to send the pulse racing.
Buying food for a picnic we head for the beaches of Ballyconneely, where the sea looks sublime, as tourquoise as the Aegean.
I turn the van down a bohreen towards a beach, but soon it becomes only a bumpy stony path, and then a suitable site for the world’s 4-Wheel Drive Championship Final.
My Transit van leaps boulders and crashes into puddles, finally parking in front of a seven foot lump of morraine that none shall pass.
Climbing over it we slump onto sea front slabs of sun-warmed granite, congratulating ourselves on being at the right place at the right time.
Well, no. Not quite the right time. As we close our eyes and soak up the rays, the tide is busy on its business.
Before you can say ‘What? No wellies?’ we are cut off from the beach, forced to paddle, fall, stumble and crawl through the shallows of the recently-arrived ocean.
Marvelling at our own stupidity we make it back to the van, and unable to turn around in the tiny space, I reverse all the way back to the main road, dripping sea water over the pedals and seats.
Don’t know what I was thinking, but I incautiously praise the van for making such a torturous journey. Naturally, hubris rules, and half a mile down the road there issues a terrible grinding sound from the near side front wheel.
‘Aha!’ thinks I, ‘A pebble is caught in the brake pads, so I will drive on until it frees itself!’
The grinding continues and deepens until it sounds as if the very gates of Hades are opening inside my front wheel. All of a sudden the brake pedal flops to the floor, loose and useless, and I pull over to the side of the road.
For a while I act the Mensch, trying to impress my companion with technical terms culled from memory.
“I’ll check the servo ... blah blah ... it’s not my big ends ... blah blah ... binding pads ... blah blah ... master and slave cylinders ... blah blah ...”
Then I lie on my back under the van and fiddle with this and that until my hands are covered with oil.
She asks what we are going to do.
I suggest we have a cigarette and wait. Suitably unimpressed she sends me off to find a house with a phone, which is no mean feat given our location.
Eventually I find a kindly old couple in a brown bungalow and call the local garage. Yer man at the other end says can I wait a few minutes and he’ll call me back.
The woman nods that I can wait, and so I settle into a seat by the range, where my eyes are assaulted by an impressive collection of religious icons hanging from the wall.
We have the Pope, something from Lourdes, Jesus holding his own bleeding heart, and I feel a little lost for words, until I suddenly remember that today is actually Ash Wednesday.
These people are clearly good Catholics, so I should pay them some respect.
“It’s Ash Wednesday today, isn’t it?” I offer, to be greeted by himself and herself sitting in absolute silence, staring stoically at me, as if they are both preserved in aspic.
“Yes.” she eventually replies, “I believe it may be.”
Spooky.
Beating a hasty retreat I make it back to the van where I try to cheer us up by preparing a wee picnic. Taking the loaf, I use my trusty penknife and slice through the bread until I feel the bone on my finger offering resistance.
My blood is oozing out in a steady flow, and trying to remain cheerful I cover it up with one, no, not enough, blood still seeping out, there, two handkerchiefs.
Look! At last, the tow truck is arriving!
The young mechanic is greeted by a seaweed-strewn soaking-wet Englishman, his hand covered in blood, brandishing a blade.
He takes a step back, fear etched on his face.
I replace the blade and offer apologies. I am a prat who has cut himself, stuffed his van and soaked our clothes. Saying nothing, he attaches tow chains to my van. We climb into the cab of his truck and set off for Clifden.
The journey is slow and eventful. I peer round to see my van lurching on its chains, swaying horribly from side to side. I decide not to look, and facing the front I become a bit perturbed when the passenger door against which I’m leaning suddenly swings open, the road beckoning me below.
“Oh yes.” intones the lad, “It does that.”
I appreciate the tip, entertaining for a moment the blissful irony involved in falling out of his truck and being run over by my own van.
Contemplating whether that might be a fitting end to our day, I continue to bleed over his spare parts, not to mention his hydraulic jack.
Later that night we return from a suitably heavy night’s drinking to find that the landlady has been into our room to deliver clean towels.
She has seen the plastic legs in the air and we have now been deprived of our spare toilet roll holder.
It’s gone. It is no more.
We are bad bad people, not to be trusted.
The next morning, possibly by way of some bizarre retribution for obscenely tampering with her doll, the landlady shows us to our breakfast table.
On the wall beside us hangs a painting of a stallion with a massive erection.
My sausage pales in comparison.
©Charlie Adley
03.04.2026
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