Lonely Planet's Ryan Ver Berkmoes guides the way to this colyoom...

Last Summer I was contacted by the Lonely Planet Guide's Ryan Ver Berkmoes, and had the pleasure of sharing with him a proper Galway afternoon out, which inevitably ended late at night. Ryan was a natural, slotting into the local rhythm and pulse as if a true Galwegian.
So I was delighted to see that Lonely Planet's Ireland Guide 2010, released two days ago, ran a wee boxed feature on the colyoom-as-was, as well as some auld Adley blather.
Of course they spelled my name wrong, turning me into Carlie Adley (the only Carlie I ever met was a 17-foot bronzed southern Californian Valley Girl, who probably spelled her name cArLi) but it's always good to get a mention, so thanks, Ryan!
Here's the slot, with typo intacto.

ADVICE FROM A COLUMNIST
Every week readers of Galway’s Tribune newspaper turn to Carlie Adley’s column about life and much more in the city and the region. An unabashed fan of the place, Adley’s heart still had to be won over originally. He came to Galway 17 years ago after a life in London, San Francisco and elsewhere. He hasn’t looked back.
‘The city centre is the perfect size for walking around, chilling out and bumping into people’, he says from one of his favourite pubs, Séhán Ua Neáchtain’s ( p400 ), where he often has his afternoon office, watching the world go by while a movable feast of friends comes and goes. Later, after the pub? ‘Who knows – Galwegians don’t make plans. The perfect Galway day is one that takes its own shape.’
Adley’s perfect day includes ‘sitting on a rock on the beach at Salthill; watching the tide turn; looking out at the ocean and trying to spot one of the Aran Islands; just being calm; and appreciating the volatile light and weather, which truly offer a different view across to County Clare every day of the year.’
Visitors looking for the real Galway, he says, need to do the above, plus ‘do the pubs and music and you can’t go wrong. Galwegians will reach out to you and have a chat; the craic awaits.’

Nasty virus compels me to self-publicise!

“Your dinner is ready!”
“Blimey! That was quick!”
I took my Chinese takeaway from the lass behind the counter and headed off to look for a taxi home. Part of me was at the time wishing that the food I’d ordered had taken another ten minutes to cook, because that was quick; that was just way too quick. There can’t have been five minutes between my order going in and the food coming out.
If I was worried that my food came out too quickly on the Saturday, I was horrified by the same phenomenon the following day, in a much more personal and unpleasant way.
As Sunday afternoon oozed into evening, I became aware of my stomach. Okay, so my belly is a massive natural phenomenon, to be rated up there with the migration of Monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico, and hence difficult to ignore at the best of times, but the feeling that grew that Sunday within me was the desire of its entirety or at least its contents to be out of me, pronto.
That night I felt so feverish I had no doubt it was the flu, so despite protestations from my wife and mother, I refused to go to the doctor, armed only with a virus that might well infect himself or other patients in his practice. What was the point? They can’t cure viruses, so all I could do was rest, drink bucketloads of fluids to replace the rivers of alien gruel coming out my nether end, and be patient.
By Tuesday the fever passed, and yet the stomach cramps came with a brutality I had not encountered for decades. At one point I accidentally referred to them as ‘contractions’, and then started to wonder whether I was having a baby. Maybe I was going to give birth to the mutant child of sweet and sour chicken and Jameson’s whiskey.
Sadly, nothing as exciting as that came to fruition. Instead my body did its best to resurrect the ancient Irish industry of seaweed fertiliser manufacture. That’s what it looked like, and I know, I know, that’s way more detail than you wanted.
Oh, and I felt so tired, so wasted, that I forgot to eat, forgot to turn off the TV for days, forgot to watch anything but the Sopranos boxed set.
With illness in my body and Tony Soprano in my head, my nights turned into confused maelstroms of New Jersey mob-dom and rushing to the bog-dom!
Mind you, it was a great diet. I lost 12 pounds in ten days, and while I wouldn’t recommend the bug as a lifestyle choice, it showed me yet again how much excess there is ready and willing to expire from my body into the ether.
Doubtless the weight I lost will be refound. All those lost pounds are out there, stumbling around the ether, lonely and sad, wondering what they did to be so rudely and unpleasantly expelled from the Daddy Ship.
Fear not belly inches! All of you will be embraced and attached back to the body you left just as soon as I find you!
Ten days later I went to the doctor, who told me that my symptoms were textbook for the norovirus, a.k.a. the ‘winter vomiting bug’, so I should go home, rest, drink loads and wash my hands 45,657 times a day, drying them on paper towels. I should burn all our household towels, bed linen and clothing, and never ever leave the house again, nor come into contact with any other human being, except those in future years who will bring me cocktails to my lounger beside my private pool.
Before the lurgy hit me off my feet and laid me supine on the sofa, I was ready to start contacting agents and publishers, because I have finished the compilation book of my ‘Double Vision’ column’s best bits.
Originally it was my intention simply to self-publish, and sell locally to my loyal readership here in Connacht, but when I took a look at the finished book, I realised that it had massive ‘Irish Interest’ market potential in the USA, as well as in the UK and here in Ireland.
The book is called ‘Do I Love Ireland?’ (very Search Engine Oriented, donchaknow) and filled with snippets, excerpts and passages from my newspaper column, published between 1992-2009 (the final 3 years of the column are on this blog).
For 17 years I grumped, sobbed and giggled my life into a thousand almost coherent words every week, and have now edited those 1,000,000 words down to 95,000. Funny, serious, silly and smart, this book is a personal, emotional, political, social and drunken history of Ireland and my life within in it, sorted in a fashion into 12 chapters.
These two decades represent a seminal period of Irish history, and along the way you get my insane life inside it, and a funky read to boot.
So I need to get an agent, and on the back of the mega-sales of this tome, finally release the other column books I have, such as my ‘Diary of a Blow-in’, the story of this London boy building himself a great life in rural Co. Mayo, which ran in the Irish Examiner for over two years. Also there are four novels, at least two of which are eminently and commercially publishable.
And yes, I am shamelessly self-publicising, because I haven’t yet found the post-viral energy to print the sample chapters, send them out and attract an agent.
Literary agents require writers to behave as if our lives depended on them, rather than the other way around. Having said that, if one is reading this and I’ve piqued your interest, licky licky kissy wissy, get in touch and I’ll try to behave myself.

There's no such thing as ‘just’ a panic attack!

(a shorter version of this post appeared yesterday in the Irish Times.)

Breathe in 4 ... out 7 ... in 4 ... out 7 ... move that belly... now in 7... and out 11, come on man, I want to see that belly move like a bellows with each breath ... in 7... out 11...
Dammit. It’s not working. I’m still feeling tense, wobbly and shaky as I pace up and down my French hospital room.
Any minute now somebody’s going to come and take me off for a stress test on an exercise bike, and I’m nervous.
The day before the doctor had warned me.
“C’est assez dur, ce teste!”
Hard? Why thanks for letting me know.
I don’t feel up to it. Maybe I should cancel it. What’s the French for ‘cancel’?
Maybe they won’t come. Maybe it won’t happen. The cardiologist had said yesterday the test was at 09:30 today, but then I was told by the nurse last night that it was to be at 10:00, and now it’s already after 10:00 and who knows, maybe it’ll just be forgotten.
Oh bugger. There’s a knock on the door. Tall dark handsome young man in a white coat.
“Monsieur Adley?”
“Oui, c’est moi.”
Great holiday this is turning out to be.
Probably should’ve gone to the doctor before leaving Ireland, presenting symptoms of exhaustion, shortness of breath and hyper-anxiety, but I was sure that a week of total chilldom at a farmhouse in Bordeaux was going to be the best medicine in the world.
Over the preceding weeks I’d worked 14 hour days, 6 days a week, going through 17 years of my ‘Double Vision’ columns from the Connacht Tribune, trying to rush out a compilation book of ‘Best Bits’ in time for the Christmas market. When the column was cut in the summer, the pressure to earn was on.
We’d flown from Shannon to Carcassonne, where Sandra had explored every nook and cranny of the old city, while I lay for many hours in our air-conditioned hotel bedroom, worried about my health, unsure whether I was fit enough to drive on.
But the vision of that farmhouse; the quiet solitude; each other’s company while the world went away: it was enough of an incentive to press on.
Had we simply done just that, life might have been different, but instead we opted to drive deep into the stunning countryside north-east of Toulouse, to spend a night with a dear old friend, in whose house we drank and ate far too much and slept way too little.
Heading off early the next morning, we were hung over, cramming new-found tiredness on top of our well-established exhaustion. After only ten minutes on the motorway I felt dangerously dizzy and pulled over.
A few minutes of walking up and down and I felt a bit better, so we climbed back into the rental car and drove on, until 20 minutes later I felt terrible again.
And so went the day. Thankfully the French péage motorways have stop-off points every few miles, with telephones, toilets and the welcoming shade of trees, and little by little we made precarious progress to the farmhouse, stretching a 4 hour drive into a 7 hour marathon. We discussed taking a room for the night somewhere, but I just wanted the journey over. Finally we arrived and the hellish drive felt worthwhile; just to be there, miles from anywhere and everyone.
Bliss. Let the relaxation begin.
I fell into bed and awoke the next morning to a cooler damper day, with the distant rumble of thunder promising the parched plains some relief.
After breakfast I went outside to breathe in the clean air, but immediately started to feel dodgy. My heart started to speed into palpitations, and my guts were turning inside out.
Climbing the farmhouse’s spiral wooden staircase proved pretty difficult, my legs suddenly wobbling and weak. I went to lay down on the bed in the spare room.
At first I thought I was having what as a teenager I’d have called a ‘headrush’. I felt nauseous, dizzy and my heart was leaping in my chest. I tried 7-11 breathing for a while, and the palpitations slowed, but I felt profoundly dreadful, from head to toe.
Believing I was having a heart attack, armed only with an Englishman's understatement, I wobbled off to inform Sandra that:
“I'm having a bit of a funny turn, love.”
Sandra came to lie beside me as I tried to concentrate on my breathing, while not 2 feet above our heads huge raindrops started to pummel the big skylight window. Thunder now boomed constantly in one unending threatening grumble, and the writer in me considered the potential of pathetic fallacy in our circumstances.
How on earth I was going to get from this isolated spot to a hospital? Sandra was not insured on the rental car, and anyway that morning I didn’t much fancy sharing her first experience of driving on the wrong side of the road.
We called Guy the caretaker who in turn called the doctor. He arrived a few hours later, took my blood pressure and informed me that I had to go immediately to hospital. He gave me a TNT pill to put under my tongue, which simultaneously compounded my fears of a heart attack whilst making me feel like an 80 year-old, 30 years prematurely.
Guy drove us to the ultramodern hospital in Saintes, where I stumbled out of the car towards the Emergency Room. Outside a group of nurses and doctors saw me trying to walk, and one came over and taking my finger gently in his hand, led me straight through the waiting room, out the back and into the treatment area, where he laid me on a bed.
I was feeling so terrible I didn’t even remember to say goodbye to Sandra, who was left to fill out forms on my behalf.
After what seemed like several hundred tests, ECGs, chest X-rays and questions, performed by uniformly smiling caring professionals, I was told that I had not had a heart attack (yippee!) and that my lungs were clear (yowza!). However, my blood pressure was dangerously high, and as they could not ascertain the cause of my shortness of breath or the pain in my chest, they were going to admit me to the cardiac unit for observation.
Two short hours after my arrival at the hospital I was installed in a room of my own, for which I was truly grateful. Never the best at sharing sleeping space, I knew my blood pressure would be unlikely to fall if I had to share a ward with scores of wheezy ancient heart patients.
And so I lay there, feeling truly awful, wondering whether I had angina.
Was this the beginning of the end of my freedom?
Was this the start of old age already? If so, I wasn’t ready for it and feared the lengthy decline that I had seen in my father.
But he was 70 when he became ill, and I did far more exercise than he ever had.
How would I ever get home? Galway felt a million miles away. The thought of the stress incumbent in a Ryanair flight was enough to send me under the bedcovers.
Throughout my stay, I learned to understand technical medical French. All the nurses, orderlies, doctors and specialists were kind, efficient and pleased to find an Englishman who could speak their language.
I was ‘The English Patient’, grateful to have fallen on my feet into French medical care, which proved as excellent as we are led to believe. What chance of lunch in an Irish hospital offering ‘Tajine boeuf citron confit olives’ followed by a dinner consisting of ‘Ouefs mollets florentines’?
Sandra had by now moved into an hotel on a nearby industrial estate, and thankfully a good friend of hers drove up from Biarritz to offer her solace, company and language support.
Unfortunately, this friend chatted with the nurses, and confirmed my worst fears: ‘angine de poitrine’ was apparently what they suspected.
Angina. Bugger. That meant an angiogram, possibly surgery, and and and ... breathe ... breathe...
The cardiologist was waiting for me inside the testing room, and as the nurse wired me up to all the machines, she explained that I had to sit on the bike and keep pedalling, whatever happened. Every 2 minutes they’d make the pedals more resistant, but even if I felt pain I must not stop, and had to keep my speed consistent between 50 and 70 on the digital doodaah.
“Okay!” I said, “Let it roll!”
Armed only with Sandra’s advice (‘Imagine you’re cycling to Bearna, baby!’) and 20 years of walking the beaches of the West of Ireland, I peddled on peddled on peddled on for miles, Luka Bloom style, until the sweat was pouring off me and the test was over.
The cardiologist had seen enough.
“You can go home now!” she said abruptly. “There is nothing wrong with your heart or lungs. For someone of your age, weight and height, you have just achieved 91% of a potential maximum. Take these pills for blood pressure, go to your doctor in Galway and make an appointment to see a cardiologist for a routine check-up. But go home. Stop smoking and drinking so much, and live a long and happy life.”
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“No, I am busy. I have patients who need me., You do not.”
In an instant all those fears, breathing problems, wobbles and trembles were dispatched to hell. I felt great.
My heart was fine!
I was free to go!
Now, back home, I understand that what I had was a panic attack. I had been juggling too many things at once; working too hard and holding too many strands of pressure in my head.
No more juggling for me. Just watch me drop those mental balls. The compilation book can wait a wee while. I’ll find another column in another paper soon enough.
My bicycle has been dusted down, lubed up and a few days ago I cycled to Bearna.
But hear me now: don’t ever say ‘Just a panic attack!’.
There is no ‘just’ about it!

Hey Tommy, did you hear the one about the Irishman who died in the famine?

Letter to the Editor - Published in the Irish Examiner

A Chara
A friend asked me if I was angry about Tommy Tiernan’s anti-semitic rant at the Electric Picnic.
“No,” I explained. “I’m not angry, just very sad.”
Sad because after nearly 20 years of living in Ireland, I thought my adopted home was finally moving on.
Sad because Tommy is an influential comedian, and if he gets away with material like this then many other bigots will feel safe spouting equal nonsense.
Sad because there is nothing remotely funny about anything he said, any more than there would be if this Jew stood up and told Irish Famine jokes to an audience of English folk.
Sad because nobody in Ireland seems to wonder why this country’s Jewish population is the only one in the free world that has shrunk of its own volition almost into oblivion. I am one of a minuscule group of Jews left living west of the Shannon.
Sad because Tiernan’s pathetic excuse that he was in 'a special protected environment where people know that nothing they say is being taken seriously' is at best disingenuous. The issue is not when or where who said what to whom, but rather that he thinks like this at all.
Sad because Ireland’s nascent anti-racist laws are puny and untested, unlike those of other modern countries who do not tolerate incitement to racial hatred.
Sad because I have encountered much anti-semitism in my life here, but it has usually come from those who have never met a Jew in their lives, and hence know no better.
That in no way justifies their views, but it does enable me to use my stock response: to tell them that ‘Sure, the worst thing about these Jews is that you can’t even spot one when they’re sitting right in front of you!’
Usually that does the trick. As soon as they see how ignorant and prejudicial they have been they learn not to do it again.
But Tommy Tiernan does know better. He has travelled the world and knows how vile and dangerous such views are once unleashed into the public arena.
Sad. Not angry. How angry can you be when you hear the term ‘Christ Killer’ for the umpteenth time in your life? Of all the anti-Semitic terms I have had fired against me, that one hurts the least. After all, Jesus was a Jew.

The agony and the ecstasy.

Being a Chelsea fan. 10 more months of this....

And this is how I feel after we win?
Oy.

And two pints of Guinness, three coffees, two pints of Hooker and three whiskies. Or 4.



And a smoky bacon burger, fries and a shake.

Chelsea, eh?