The most dangerous thing in Galway City? A coffee on Monday at 4 o'clock!

Weekend nights have never figured much on my social map of Galway. Everywhere is packed, and many of my friends are busy working, keeping the city pumping with great food and foaming pints.
So by Monday this scribbler is in need of some kind of human interaction. I'm not looking for a major session. I just want to sit and watch the people go up and down Quay Street. A cup of coffee, maybe even one pint, and then back home for a quiet evening, to be followed by a productive day's work unhampered by heinous hangover.
Pretty soon after moving to Galway I discovered that there is nothing more dangerous than arranging to meet a friend for coffee at 4 o'clock.
By five the second coffee is kicking in and then a wee whiskey appears, and the next thing you know you're waking up at 10:30 the next morning on a sofa in a strange house, wondering who you are, why you're not dead if you feel like this, and maybe you are dead and this is hell.
These days I am more careful. The auld fella jus' can't take it like he used to, d'ya'know?
That's not to say I don't occasionally take the risk of enjoying myself.
A couple of weeks ago I wandered innocent into Neachtain's at 4 o'clock, and was as surprised and delighted as an ingenue to find the place packed with eclectic bunches of friends, from all strands of my life.
Unfortunately, as is sometimes the case with my strange head, I couldn't handle it, standing there frozen like a Fianna Fail minister in the dock suffering from Memory Loss Syndrome.
How am I?
She only asked how I am. For god's sake Charlie, get your act together,
Sorry love, can you start with the easy ones, please. I don't know how I am, and believe me, if I try to explain how I might be, you will truly regret ever asking.
Even though I still l consider myself a non-smoker, I carry a pack of fags. Not only can a sly smoke make me feel wonderfully and instantly sick and jangly, but going outside for a ciggy can make for a pretty handy escape.
So I turn and make to flee, when I suddenly hear a voice calling my name from the cubby hole. Ignoring it, I press on, but the voice calls again, with the unmistakable Northern brogue of my esteemed colleague and talented artist Allan Cavanagh: he wot herein visually makes me look like a complete twerp each week.
Excellent! Allan I can deal with, and dive into that wonderful little snug square at the front of the pub. Whiskeys, pints, and gentle craic flow as steadily the soft rain outside.
The Snapper arrives. More whiskey and oh my goodness what a surprise - I now find myself well able to go and talk to the crew with whom I abjectly failed to communicate earlier. Now we are all operating on the same level of intoxication, and my oh my, how could I ever have felt alienated?
I love it!
I love you and you and you!
Allan, the Snapper and I dive out and head to Dominick Street to avail ourselves of the excellent Spanish food available at Cava. Obviously it's not like the Spanish food you eat in Spain, any more than bacon and cabbage in Lanzarote is the real deal, but it is as delicious and authentic as might be possible in Galway. The service is excellent, the company witty and acerbic, and by the time my belly is full of chorizo marinated in sherry, the world looks fluffy and cute.
Then I decide to have a second espresso with my cartoonist colleague, which tips me over the edge and leaves me babbling like an asinine idiot on steroids. Thankfully, my company find it amusing, but I should have known better. A half hour later my head is splitting with a caffeine comedown, while the alcohol is still pumping merrily around my bloodlines, unable to be processed by my poor old overtaxed liver.
I hate it when somebody doesn't know their own limits, especially when it's me. By the time you make 'adult' you're meant to know what is enough for you. Of course we all need to fall off our controlled perches of responsibility once in a while, but what on earth was all that throwing up for when you were a teenager, if you learned nothing about where to draw the alcoholic line? Caffeine I underestimate, and even though I am unable to stop my mouth blah blah blabbering at the restaurant, deep inside I sincerely wish I would shut the fuck up and stop being such a prat.
Now is the time to say "Well Done!" to Alan Williams, the chef-proprietor of Abalone, who had the balls to open his restaurant on Dominick Street a few years back, when that end of the road was dying on its feet.
Since Abalone's arrival, and subsequent deserved success, the entire block has come back to life with a vengeance: Hehir's have opened a branch of their bakery/cafe; Arabica have opened next to them; Cava has opened next to Abalone, and just up from a recently-opened Mocha Beans cafe; E Brun's excellent pub has opened on the other side of Abalone and Galway Taxis have moved their base to a few doors up.
Cava is a welcome addition to Galway City, as indeed is all that inner-city regeneration off Quay Street.
What time did we get home? I don't know, but those 4 o'clock coffees, man, they're lethal.

****

The day after that night's excesses, I met a friend for lunch at the Racing Lodge in Doughiska, and took the opportunity to do my shopping at the new-(ish!) Dunnes in Briarhill. So great was my alertness and well-being that I drove all the way back to Salthill before I realised that I'd left half my shopping in the bloody supermarket. Having trudged through the rain and endless traffic back to Briarhill, I was delighted to be greeted by smiling caring Dunnes staff.
The Dunnes girls had put my bags to one side for safekeeping, and even thought to store my dairy items in the fridge. Ladies, thanks so much for your smiles, and for giving a damn. You made my recovery much less painful!

Life becomes worthless if you choose not to live it!

The word on the street is that this colyoom has been rather depressing of late, so with that in mind, I feel the time has come to lay to rest my grieving process.
Clearly I'm not ready to stop missing my Dad. I will always miss him, love him, and I fully expect further surprising apples of grief to float to the top of the barrel over the next few months and years.
What I can do, to help myself and liberate you loyal colyoomistas from the endless references to his death that have been littering this space recently, is to draw a line in the sand; finally let out that which I have as yet been keeping in.
When somebody dies, everybody wants to help and nobody knows what to do or say.
The most ubiquitous piece of advice handed out is that it is good to talk. Well, there's good common sense like that, and then there's the reality of how you feel. Even though my life is blessed by a plethora of loving and supportive friends, I have pretty much kept my process to myself. Unable to hide my feelings, even when I want to, my emotional state has been there for all to see, but inside, I have been dealing with everything as well as I can, whilst not reaching out as one might.
Despite the universally-accepted stages of grieving, we are fantastic fallible and freaked-out humans, with processes as individual and different as we are ourselves.
Having said everything I needed to say to Dad, I had no denial, acceptance or bargaining to deal with. Instead, I encountered the effects of the 11 year-long process of flying back and forth to be there when he was in and out of hospital. Everyday life became traumatic; affeared of the telephone ringing; at any given moment off to Galway Airport and away.
I always knew there'd be a payoff for that, and boy, so there was, in the shape of months of bewildering exhaustion.
Then, out of nowhere, the other night I was watching tele and started to cry. I cried and cried and cried, finally feeling the pleasure of pure unadulterated sadness flowing through me. No longer the confusion of utter fatigue.
Just tears.
What a shame Dad couldn't have been at our wedding day. How strange it will be when the football season starts and there's no Dad to call. What's the point in reading the cricket scores any more, what with Dad being dead and nobody else giving a damn?
Sad, at last. Sitting on the sofa, finally free and able to miss my Dad.
Up until then my grief had taken various forms, all of which felt completely unsurprising and understandable. These differing emotions and thoughts appeared, one at a time, in my heart or head, allowing me to deal with them each in a gentle and private way.
There really didn't seem to be any need to talk about it all with other people, because none of it was a mystery. I felt confident that I could best deal with it all on my own.
Without doubt, the hardest stage was when my usually optimistic, fearless and confident nature started to be bombarded by morbid thoughts.
When you're young, your grandparents are the first to face their fate, and then your parents move up a notch. With Dad gone, I suddenly saw nothing between me and my own death, and dark defeatist thoughts filled my head and deadened my heart, placing a chill into my soul that froze me for a while, forcing me to re-evaluate dreams and ambitions that had been, up to that point, as solid and permanent a part of me as my life itself.
Ever since the age of 25, I have known that I wanted kids, but when Dad died, and I was recovering from the brutal hell of his gradual decline, I deeply doubted my desire to procreate.
Even before Dad died, I had been only too aware of how demanding being a new parent might be as I approach my 50th year, but for the first two months after his death, I was besieged by terrible fears.
How could I possibly put any other person through this dreadful, long and painful period that I had just endured? How could it be in any way responsible to have a child so late in life, thereby leaving the Snapper with a young thing after I had gone? How dreadful would it be never to see my children grow up? How difficult would it be for those children to live with an old and ailing father?
The great thing about emotions and irrational thoughts is that they exist alongside and despite all our knowledge, experience and ability to think rationally. Even though I knew what a load of old tosh these thoughts were, they were as real to me as my tired baggy-eyed phisog in the mirror each morning, and to some extent I have still not rid myself of them completely.
Such is the utterly personal nature of grief, I felt it pointless to discuss these thoughts and feelings with my nearest and dearest, because I recognised them for what they were: wholly natural and understandable parts of my own process. I didn't need to be told that such thoughts were nonsense, because part of me knew they were, while another felt they warranted some merit, which in small doses they do.
But I have never lived as one paralysed by fear, and I'm not about to start now. I know that in time these thoughts and feelings will have disappeared, only to be replaced by other doubtless challenging and draining stages of grieving. But while I have breath and while I am able to love and be loved, I will continue to embrace the new and face the unknown with high hopes.
Why?
Well, because, at its basest, life becomes worthless if you choose not to live it.
So there'll be no more colyoomistic references to my Dad's death. At least, not until such time as memory has allowed me to see the man I knew and loved so much before he was ill.
Then it will be a pleasure to share my memories of him with you once more.
Until then, this colyoom will endeavour to wrap a smile around your lips more frequently.

We lost our holiday, but the travel agents lost their temper!

Oh dear, oh dear, it's all gone horribly wrong.
Early on in my present grieving process I discovered that, at the moment, I am not able to deal well with upsetting people. Sadly, even armed with this knowledge, I have not been able to curtail my natural talent for doing just that.
For the last few years the Snapper and I have made up our fly-drive holidays as we went along, but this year, completely and utterly exhausted after the funeral and the wedding, we decided that for our September honeymoon we wanted something simpler: something that required no brain power whatsoever.
We hadn't taken a package holiday since 2001, and the idea of being flown to and dropped into a nice room by a pool under a blue sky felt perfect.
So off I went into a Galway city centre travel agent, where the helpful woman listened carefully to what I said I wanted, and came up with a self-catering complex in a quiet town in Crete, with flights from Knock.
We booked it, paid in full and felt mightily relieved that we could now forget all about it. A few weeks later we received a letter from the tour company, forwarded to us by our Galway travel agency, saying that our holiday had been cancelled. They had decided that it wasn't financially viable to operate a flight back from Crete in the second week of September. We could go earlier, or go for just one week, or get a full refund.
We definitely wanted two weeks, (this is a honeymoon, folks!) and didn't want to go earlier, as the Snapper had already booked time off work, and anyway, I figured they'd have to squeeze us into an already busy hotel.
So I called the tour company and asked for a refund. They told me that I should call the travel agency in Galway. This made sense to me, because it was the travel agency's name that had appeared on my credit card bill, and at the simplest of levels, it was the travel agency with whom I had dealt.
The Snapper and I were deeply upset about the loss of our Cretan adventure, and suddenly fearful of having no holiday at all. The travel agency said that they would chase our refund, but nobody offered to find us alternative arrangements for the weeks booked, so eager to find an instant and magical replacement holiday that might return the smile missing from my Snapper's face, I found myself going bleary-eyed at the computer, doing just what I had hoped to avoid.
We heard unconfirmed reports that in the UK, there is a statutory compensation payment of something like £20 per person, if your holiday has been cancelled within 28 days of the departure date. I'm still not sure if that's right, but it set me thinking.
I had gone into a shop and bought something that cost me over ¤1,600, and now, I didn't have anything to show for it except a credit card charge that has cost us a decent chunk of interest over the last two months.
I was only out of pocket because the tour company had made a decision to save some money, and I now had to find a holiday fast, and take whatever prices were on offer, so I emailed the travel agency, asking if they might consider some kind of goodwill compensation payment.
To be honest, a 20 quid gesture would have done the trick. Suddenly stressed and poorer than when I started, all I wanted was something to make us both feel a little less let down, a tad more human.
Wish I hadn't! There ensued a bizarre and frankly ridiculous email correspondence that stretched over an entire week. after which I was more than aware that I was not going to get any kind of compensation.
As a person who grew up in the retail industry, I found their attitude truly bizarre. The owner of the travel agency immediately wrote me off as a potential customer, told me to pursue the tour company, and ended up sending me a long list of all the other tour companies who had cancelled holidays in September, leaving holidaymakers stranded, along with the following:
"Not one of these customers has looked for compensation from us ... not a single one."
I have to admit, when I read that, I saw red. Why in god's name were they upset with me? And what was the nasty inference within that '...not a single one'?
That line annoyed me all night long. Clearly this person was upset with me, even though on the phone the next day, they said that they were not.
I didn't want to upset them, any more than I wanted to upset the person at the ITAA (Irish Travel Agents Association), but somehow I managed to do that too. The owner of the travel agent told me that after I had called the ITAA to ask for advice, I had subsequently misquoted and misrepresented the ITAA person in my communication. When I called the ITAA person back, to find out why and what they were upset about, I encountered a voice now both stormy and suspicious.
Blimey! Even though I thought the Snapper and I were the injured parties, I had now managed to upset both the travel agent and the person at the ITAA.
As I said, I'm not good at dealing with upsetting people at the moment. One never wants to do it anyway, but quite how I managed to upset two different people whilst trying to seek recompense for our own stress and monetary loss, I will never fully understand.
There's a lot I don't know, but travel I do know. I've hitchhiked over 200,000 miles; been around the planet twice, lived and worked in six countries on three continents and yet never have I come across such strange reactions to a customer's loss.
Next Tuesday we are flying to Mallorca, where we're staying in a tiny village on the quiet west coast. The owner of our 3 Star hotel sent me an email, saying that my booking was confirmed; that he didn't need my credit card number as a deposit, because my word was good enough for him; and what time would we like dinner?
I wish the travel agencies of Ireland well, but cannot see why I might ever go into one again.

My very own Ground Zero? Sainsbury's Car Park, Stanmore, North-West London, England!

Alright already, I'm sorry!
It seems that some of you didn't take too kindly to a being called 'a bunch of nutters' in this colyoom a couple of weeks ago. To be honest, I never understand people who take things out of context simply in order to become outraged.
Yes, indeed I did say that a large chunk of the Irish population were a 'bunch of nutters', but then I went on to explain how, coming from me, that was a compliment.
But sure enough, there were the angry emails, flying into my inbox, the general theme of which was the horribly familiar cry of:
"If you don't like it here, go back to where you come from."
Sorry, lads, even if I wanted to, I can't, because I'm not sure where that is. Born in London, but only 2 generations British, and before that, who knows? One night many years ago, my much-loved recently-departed father was in his armchair, knocking back the scotch, when an item appeared on the news about Lithuania.
"Ah yes, that's where we are from!" he uttered in guttural croak.
"Really? But I thought you always said your side came from Germany?"
Having reached that point of his evening's drinking when it was more important to be right than accurate, he insisted his point by pointing at the tele with a swaying arm, and once more asserting,
"There. That's it. Where we come from."
Admittedly, when I mentioned this exchange to him many years later, he looked at me with utter amazement.
"Don't be ridiculous! I'd never say such a thing!"
But if you loved and respected Dad as I did and do, which Dad do you believe?
Add in the fact that I have spent far more adult years living outside England than in it; the fact that as a Jew, I resent and despise the historical and ethnic implications involved in being 'sent' from a country (especially from this country, which reflexively and ignorantly opposes everything about Israel) and you start to see why I don't know where is 'back'.
Anyway, my point is that I don't want to leave. I love living here.
If you only knew how I go on and on about loving my life in the west of Ireland whilst visiting my family and friends in England. There is something completely fascinating to me about belonging to two nations (three, if you count the Jewish Diaspora), particularly when the lucky winners are England and Ireland.
My countries share an uncomfortable history (a euphemism only an Englishman could use!), and (ex-Gaeilge!) a language. The really significant difference is population size, with Ireland having only 4 million lucky individuals, compared to 65 million English people having to get along with each other. Obviously, the English need different 'coping strategies', as they are wont to say these days; which brings me to my identity's very own Ground Zero: Sainsbury's Car Park in my family's North-West London suburb.
Underground, yellow-jacketed security men direct the traffic around in slow moving snakey jams, which come to a stop each time somebody finds a car leaving a space. The process requires good humour and patience, but the English are a warrior race, and soon enough, geezer in Ghia decides he's had enough, and swings around the wrong way, going against the arrows and all that is good, in order to 'alf-inch my parking spot.
Being now invested with Galway mentality, I smile and point and wave my hand, telling him in what I felt was more than reasonable mime that the space he coveted was mine.
Does he give a damn? Dropping a gear, he leaves tyre rubber on the car park concrete, and shoots his hatchback prematurely into my space.
Getting out of his car, he pushes his chin forward twice, like he's a Mitchell brother, staring at me, eager for me to 'ave a go if think I'm 'ard enough.
Despite knowing that a parking space is not really one of life's worthy causes, I am furious, and being a product of the same society as himself, want to beat him to a messy pulp of bone and gore.
But if I did that, how would I explain to my mum about the blood on her dry cleaning?
Instead I think back a few days, to a similar situation in the Claddagh.
I was just turning my car around so that I could slide into a parking space, when another car pulled up and started to park in my spot.
I waved my hands and smiled.
The bloke in the car waved his hand back, smiled, laughed a bit, pulled out of the space and drove off.
Of course I'm not saying that there are no aggressive arseholes in Ireland. What I am saying is that the chances of you getting into a physical fight over a parking space are infinitesimally smaller in this country than that.
The next morning I went down to the Maxol in Lower Salthill, my mind still severely tested from over-exuberance the night before. After visiting the cashpoint, I was walking to the garage shop, listening in the background to a rapid
'BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!'
'That sounds like a cashpoint machine with money hanging out of it.' thought I to myself. 'Oh shit! That is a cashpoint machine with money hanging out of it, and that money is mine! And if I don't get the money out in time, the machine will pull it back in, although it's already been deducted from my account, leaving me broke, with all hell to pay with the bank to make sure that I get my money back, and anyway, I need the bloomin' cash, right now, and-'
The beeping stopped. My heart sank. And then, from around the corner came a charming smiling local woman, clutching my cash.
"Oh hello! Is this yours? I thought I'd better grab it for you!"
To that woman, whoever you are, I say many thanks.
Thanks for being a wonderful warm trustworthy human being.
Thanks for restoring my faith in our species.
And thanks for reminding me why I live here.
Chances of that happening in England? Less than zero.
One country feels like my past, the other feels like my home; the rest of my life.
So sorry, you're stuck with me. And if that makes me a nutter, I'm sure you'll not hesitate to tell me.

My recession is like peanut butter, more smooth than crunchy!

Sitting outside Neactain's, sipping my coffee and watching the world go by: it doesn't get much better than this. Happiness comes fleeting though, and as I open my newspaper I leave myself vulnerable to doom and gloom tales of the 'Credit Crunch'.
'Stuff that for a laugh!', think I, laying the paper back down on the table.
Standing opposite me, on the corner of Quay Street and Cross Street, two young people are standing motionless.
The bloke is wearing a sandwich board advertising the Bold Gallery, while the lass is holding a post with an arrow sign pointing to the Living Room pub.
I wonder how many people actually respond to those signs? Both the art gallery and the pub are successful businesses, and successful businesses don't waste money on pointless advertising, especially if times are so hard.
As a freelance writer who used to try to sell advertising space in the 1980's, I know only too well that when recession hits, the first cutbacks companies make are to their advertising budgets and their freelancers.
So how can these two local outfits afford to employ these inert adverts? Maybe they pay for themselves in spades, and then again, maybe times are really really hard, and these are the owners themselves, acting in pure desperation.
I think not. I think they are gainfully employed young things showing patience and endurance, oiling the wheels of enterprise in what looks to me like a pretty vibrant High Street economy.
Far be it from me to suggest that I am right while the combined experience and genius of the world's economists are wrong.
But if we're to believe what we're being swamped with by the media, the economic times they are a-changing. A hard rain's gonna fall. The boom is over and we're all going to have to tighten our belts, and all that phooey.
There's a very good reason why politicians and economists talk about the importance of 'consumer confidence'. They know that the entire premise of modern western capitalism is a confidence trick, and the whole shebang can come tumbling down as quickly as you can say 'Berings Bank.'
At some point we are informed by the combined forces of media and industry that times are good; that there's people out there getting stinking rich, and isn't it about time we applied for 56 different types of credit card?
Off we go like happy little shoppers, enjoying the fruits of this wondrous yet illusory boom with money we don't have, thereby keeping the cash pumping round the pyramid.
And never forget that it is a pyramid. Even though it might be illegal to construct and run pyramid selling scams, there can be no denying that the entire premise of capitalism is pyramidal. The only notion up for debate is whether the Thatcherite 'Drip-drip-drip' theory works, whereby the compassion of the rich allows a certain amount of affluence, social welfare and health se
rvices to seep down into our proletarian lives, or whether the rich bastards just sit on their piles and don't give a flying fahooley about us and our miserable existences.
Hmm, tricky one that.
After all, we all know that super rich would be the very first people we'd turn to for the price of a cup of tea, don't we?
Let go of that romantic notion that by investing in stocks and shares you are supporting the job security of those companies' workers.
Nah mate. These days economic players gamble with vast amounts of money that never physically existed. The markets are only about making a quick killing and moving on. Think millions of buffalo on the Great Plains of America, then see them all dead: that kind of thing.
Booms are a mug's game, unless you happen to be one of the five incredibly rich people who became yet more incredibly rich, by selling high whichever assets you bought low. To make that possible there has to have been a sustained period of 'consumer confidence', so that the Price Is Right to cash in your wad and disappear to Mauritius on your 200 foot yacht.
As soon the rich have cashed in their chips, word goes out that the good times are over, and whaddya know? The money oiling the machine has become laden with debt that nobody wholly owns, the machine gets hotter and hotter with inflation until it goes into meltdown, and then we get mass unemployment, and nobody wants to buy anything because we're not 'confident'.
Except that there are still sandwich boards on Quay Street, and six different newspapers on the streets of Galway every week, which hardly smacks of recession. Newspapers need advertising to survive, and as I said before, that's the first budget to go. Thankfully this Noble Rag is a proper newspaper, worth paying for because it's filled with more newsworthy words than products availiable to purchase.
I know, I know, I would say that, wouldn't I! But it's true: newspapers carry news, while freebies carry adverts, and as four of our weekly papers are freebies, I cannot see them all surviving a true recession.
Oh sorry, should I say 'Credit Crunch'? Can lickle diddums no longer face the word 'recession'? Some bloke on the radio was saying that 'Credit Crunch' sounds more like a Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavour than an economic crisis. Love it.
Personally, I couldn't care. I certainly don't wish hard times upon anyone, but there's the goings on in the world's economies, and then there's my own tiny existence. Round in Chazzaland, things are financially as tight as they could possibly be, but for the best of reasons.
After the madness and mayhem that has been my life for the last six months, I've put away enough for a holiday in September, and am now taking a few weeks out to write my fiction, break the back of the novel's final draft.
So I've been living on less than the dole, and am therefore unaffected by all talk of major economic downturn. Sure, living thus requires a certain discipline, but I am simply happy to be doing something that makes sense to me, (only time will tell if it does the same for others!) and suggest that rather than buying into the idea of economic disaster, you do something that's free and guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Keep it clean people, please.
Ooh, okay then, don't.