Why was it so hard to write this colyoom?

Sitting in my car on the clifftop at Kilcummin Back Strand, I looked out at the sumptuous bay. The greenest of headlands deliver quintessential Ireland, as they fringe an empty beach sheltered by massive dunes.

I was about to walk this beloved beach, where my ashes will be scattered, and then watch the tide turn.

Call it meditation, mindfulness or mooky-mooky-moo.
I don’t care.

It’s what I do.
I’ve been watching tides turn for 35 years.

Find a rock or a piece of driftwood to sit on, breathe out and stare at a fixed point near the water’s edge.

A spiral of sandy wormcast.
A smooth black pebble.
The tip of a rock poking out above the ocean shallows.

Then watch that point until either it disappears, subsumed by the Atlantic Ocean, or is left high and dry as the waters recede.

Before I left the car my phone rang, and I’m told that my lovely mum’s care has cost the inheritance that might have bought me a house.

I’d never own a home, because my mum is still alive. Happy with that equation every day of the week.

18 months ago this was, after a 6 year tsunami of major life poop, including a divorce, two evictions and a rare bacterial infection that nearly killed me three times.

I’d lost all my savings, all my income, half a lung and my dog, alongside several lifetime friends, who chose my most vulnerable time to become angry with me.

Although the pain of those losses is indescribable, I give thanks that I still have many wonderful friends.

As the inimitable Dalooney put it:
“Jeeze Chazzer, I’ve never seen someone lose so many lifetime friends and have so many left!”

During those dark years I also discovered that my PRSI payments were a disaster, and when the time comes I’ll inherit just enough to exclude me from the means-tested pension.

Old age suddenly looked decidedly grim: no home, no income.

A couple of months after that clifftop call I had a terrible fallout with a close family member, which finished off whatever was left of my mental health.

I reached out to a close friend, unaware that they too were enduring mental health issues, and instead of comfort I was ridiculed in public.

Reach out, they say.
Let me tell you, reaching out is not always successful.

There then followed a hellish weekend I will never forget, chewing valium dawn 'til dawn, asking myself what is the point?

That’s when I discovered suicidal thoughts don't come with a fanfare.

No melodrama.
Not a scream in sight. Merely a deep sigh and fuck me, is it really worth it?
Life is such hard work.
Just too much hassle.

I’m blessed by the love of many, but nobody relies on me, so what difference would it make?

Then I thought of my beautiful friend who walked into the sea just the year before, and the pain I feel for her loss; that devastating grief of wishing I’d done more.

No. I wouldn’t put others through that.

Well, if I wasn't going to die, I had to sort my life out. After working all my life, I never imagined it ending homeless and penniless.

Loyal colyoomistas, be aware: none of us are far from that oblivion.

I thought about the guy who lived by the river. The weather forecast said that there was going to be a massive flood, but he prayed to God and felt safe.

Then a woman from the village come to tell him they were all evacuating, but our guy just smiled and said he trusted God to help him out.

When the rains came and the river flooded, a man came in a boat, but our guy just waved him past and prayed.

Then the flood came, so our guy was on the roof of his house when the helicopter arrived.

“No thanks, I’m not leaving. I trust in God.”

They flew off. Our guy drowned, and as soon as he arrived in Heaven he had a right go at God for abandoning him in his hour of need.

God shrugged and said:

“Oy! What more could I do? I sent you a weather forecast, and I sent a woman from the village. I sent a man in a boat, and I sent a team in a helicopter. I can’t help you if you refuse to help yourself.”

 

I can be a righteous pit-bull when I want to be. Like a dog with the scent of hare, I chased it.

I secured the signature of my lung consultant on my medical needs housing application form. He asserted that the old stables where I was holed up were mouldy and damp; lethal to a man with chronic lung conditions.

Then a local councillor agreed to be my advocate with Mayo County Council, and I enlisted another friend who has local political clout.

They both proved a massive help.

Six months ago I got the home, for which I gave thanks two colyooms ago, so take a look: click here to read it 

Around the same time a friend told me about a scheme that allowed me to pay retrospective contributions for a UK pension. I filled out the forms but doubted success, sure that my young hitching life was too peripatetic to qualify for any pension.

Fear is a powerful fuel, while the love of others offered me a whole heap of help.

I love being wrong. Like a rescue dog, I’m now in my forever home, and as of last week, after a rare miracle of bureaucratic efficiency, there’s the distinct possibility that I’ll qualify for an almost full UK pension.

I called the friend who encouraged me to apply for the scheme, and told him I will be forever grateful.

The vast majority of my life I have enjoyed swimming with the tide. From 2016 to 2024 that tide turned against me, and it was brutal.

Confession: I’ve been uncharacteristically nervous about hitting the right tone in this piece. Despite my fervent love for the passion of the First Draft with Capital Letters, there are rare colyooms such as this that leave your scribbler unable to whack it all down, as I usually do.

The first draft is the soul of writing, all subsequent efforts being editing, and it is my duty to preserve the passion and power of that first draft as I improve my work.

However this piece has been the opposite of a first draft. My emotions are still so raw that I managed only a series of short jabs to the keyboard, over weeks, as I came to terms with the profundity of safety.

This is not me telling you what you should do.
This is not me telling you to look at what a mighty man I am.
This is neither practical advice nor philosophical guidance.

This is simply the story of a process.
It’s what happened to me.
You might like to know.

15 months ago I had neither a home nor a pension.
Life was not worth living.
Now I’m safe.
My tide turned.



©Charlie Adley
28.07.2025

Backroads are best, but you do need cars to hitch!

Artwork as always from the excellent Allan Cavanagh of Caricatures Ireland.com

 

I’m watching the sun rise, vast and slow, through the glass wall of my friend’s West Cork clifftop eyrie.

A silver morning haze hangs over the ocean.
That sky will be blue within the hour.
A perfect day to hitch back to Galway.

My friend drops me on the Bandon Road. I’ve looked at the map, and decided that getting through Cork City might be tricky. Cut up to Mallow, a few backroads, sure, what’s the rush boy? You’re in Cork, d’ja’know?

My first lift comes from a nice guy in a Citroen Van, who wants to talk about my accent.

Then a lawnmower man pulls over, almost crashing into the transit van who also decides to stop for me.

My friend Susan reckons it’s something to do with my relationship with the Goddess of the Road. Whatever it is, I’m glad it works. Yer man tells me I should go to Cork City, but I feel it’s time to leave the main road, time to walk a few miles in the early morning sun.

A little old lady takes me three miles, saying “Oh I know!" over and over again. She drops me by a hedge, where I marvel at the beauty available to the hitcher.

What other form of transport offers you such a place? A gentle rush of flowing water from invisible grassy depths; birdsong; all the time in the world.

And then some.
No cars.

A farmer with the hairiest nose in the world stops his ancient Nissan Bluebird, tells me I should have gone to Cork City, and drives me one mile.

I never walk and hitch,. What’s the point? But I do walk until I find a good place to hitch. After a few miles around bends where the road is lined with hedgerows, I come finally to a small straight stretch.

Hitching is only empathy. Think like a driver.
The first car stops, and I am in a metal box with a mad woman. 

"Don’t mind me - I’m late. Where are you going? Mallow? Oh I am going to Macroom. I can take you to Macroom. Mallow? But I am not going to Mallow? Why are you on this road? Where are you going? I am turning for Macroom. Don’t mind me, I am very late. Why are you going to Macroom?”

She lets me out.
Ahhh.

As she wends her crazy way, I laugh out loud. I am in the most glorious place.

A river deep and blue
rolling verdant hills of velvet pasture
meadowsweet and cow parsley
crows cawing in the tall trees
wild cherry blossoms and bumble bees.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A woman approaches, walking. I smile, and understate the obvious.

"Lovely day!" to which she replies in a way that only a very small number of exclusively Irish are able

"We’ve got it too soon, so. Too soon, that’s what it is!"

She passes me, no eye contact, no hint of a smile. Astonishing attitude, yet a catalyst for me to enjoy the sunshine all the more.

Another short lift, from a charming man who talks of childhood bacon and cabbage. After he drops me off, I eat a chocolate bar watched by a herd of cows who come to make me feel guilty.

Horror of horrors, a truck crawls up the hill towards me, engine screaming in the redline howl of second gear.

Please don’t let him stop.

Please please, ple - oh shit. The truck is going so slowly, I'm walking along beside the open door, as it crawls along with its load of grit.

"Where you going? Mallow? Well, throw your bag on boy."

Over the next twenty minutes I employ various Zen techniques to turn this nightmare into a, like, positive experience, man.

Oh look how well I can see over the hedges, and how much time I have to watch the cows ruminating.

All life is the scream.
The engine scream.

And the rattle.

The scream and the rattle and the fact that he insists on shouting at me over this cacophonic duet.

I’m left at a dusty crossroads, where I stand for hours and hours and hours. There are two pubs (closed), a garage (who knows?) and a hair salon (closed), but apart from a woman in slippers and a very friendly dog, I see nobody.

No people. No Cars.

I begin gently hallucinating in shadeless sunshine.

Maybe I'm tripping.
Maybe Ireland is Spain.

After decades hitching, I know not to feel despair, but that crossroads pushes me close to it.

It’s taken me six hours not to get to Mallow.

A fast car with a yellow-shirted builder takes me to the outskirts of Mallow, where I climb up a steep bank and scramble onto the edge of the N20.

Aharrr, Jim Lad, look ye at all them cars!

A walk to the next exit ramp, and a lift to Charleville immediately.

"In all fairness, now, in all fairness, I have to say, I have to. How old do you think, in all fairness, a turkey might live for, as much as you can say, in all fairness?"

Maybe I am mad, and they are all wonderfully sane.

A sales rep wants to turn a bad day into a good one, so he takes me to pick up his child and girlfriend, and then drives me all the way over to the other side of Limerick, just so that I can swiftly pick up a ride.

I do, in a transit with a guy who tells me he’s not slept for three days. He decides to drop me at Shannon Airport, (what is that socks smell?) where Victor picks me up, and tells me of Nigeria as he whisks me to Ennis.

The sun is drooping a little, my legs are falling off me, and it’s a long old walk through Ennis. I pray, just in case Susan is right about my Goddess.

She’s right. A car suddenly pulls over, blocking the traffic, and the lady in it asks me if I know the road to Gort. I tell her I am hitching on it. She tells me to jump in.

I’ll be in Galway before dark. That pint...

The very amiable Philip picks me up from Gort, whisking me around, to buy a wheelbarrow and borrow an electric planer.

From Kilcolgan I am delivered to Galway by a man with a fixed babyface smile, who speaks of pouring the concrete for his house tomorrow, and how since yesterday he is the proud father of Rebecca.

Finally, I’m walking along the Eglington Canal, towards that Galway City pint.

As I enter Taylor’s Bar on Dominic Street, the last drop of light drifts from a long day’s sky.

 

 

 

©Charlie Adley

 22.07.2025

Bring back our barstools!

                   

Thanks to Allan Cavanagh at Caricatures Ireland.ie

As I walk into the hotel bar my spirit sags.

No barstools.

Oh bloody hell.
Bang goes another one.

 

That’s my plans for the evening scuppered.

A couple of years ago I sat at this bar eating great fish and chips, enjoying a little gentle craic with the barman, but not tonight.

 

Once my dinner is in me I’ll not feel like hanging around. Sitting alone at a table, I feel self-conscious, a bit too BillyNoMates for my liking.

 

In pubs, bars and especially hotels, barstools are disappearing. There’s so little money to be made from selling booze these days, pubs and hotels sacrifice service at the bar to focus on flogging food to tables.

 

As a single person who likes to spend an hour or three in a bar drinking whiskey, I truly deeply mourn their passing.

 

I love barstools.

 

It makes no difference if it’s a tiny stool in a train station corner bar; a familiar friend in one of my locals, or a stool which hasn’t yet had the opportunity to meld with my voluptuous arse: wherever the barstool, I sit, breathe out, relax and stare at the optics.

 

At the bar I am blissfully and defiantly alone: might want conversation, but more likely I just want to sit, sip whiskey and trigger reflections in my brainbox.

All those random barstools in countless other bars.
This barstool here equals that barstool there.
What was life like, back there, back then?
Can I glean some wisdom from this mirror gazing?
Am I simply disappearing up my own hole?

That barstool in the Deluxe on Upper Haight, San Francisco, when I lived down the road. The barman had cheeky eyes, twinkling between the brim of his straw boater hat and his grey waxed moustache. That was a good cocktail bar.

We’ve already lived America through our movie screens and TVs, so the bars are familiar to our European eyes. Different from both English and Irish pubs and European cafés, I love American bars. They feed my addiction to their low-life culture.

My mind wanders to that wobbly tall wooden barstool in the bar just up from the Projects. Good people who were looking out for me advised me not to drink there, but they needn't have worried.

I grew up sitting on barstools in London pubs, where mine was a rare white face, so I never gave it a second thought.

Galway City and County are home to many of my favourite barstools. In the early 90s the middle three barstools in an Tobar, with Blitz on one side and The Body on the other, Whispering Blue serving behind the bar, that far away look in his eyes: everyone happily resigned to another great Galway night of excess.

The knackered brown barstools in Keogh’s in Ballyconneely, before Brendan converted the place in ’94. You’d leave with a rim imprinted on your buttocks from the frame, while the cushion, long retired from supporting human backsides, actually sank below the seat altogether.

While he was building the new pub, Brendan erected a massive marquee over the pub garden, and set up the bar inside. So for a few months we sat on barstools and drank our pints staring at a palm tree and a flower bed. Sometimes we thought we were losing our minds, drinking beer in Connemara while the white canvas walls blew in and out like vertical waves on the western wind.

That vital barstool in Terry’s in Clifden, where each trip I ceremoniously have a pint of Guinness in celebration of having yet again driven past my hills and lakes; yet again been moved and enthralled.

Sadly, over the decades, it has also become the barstool to which I flee when someone dies.

Any of the middle stools at the bar of Harriet Leander’s Nimmo’s, with Charlie Minot behind the bar. Bliss.

The corner of the front bar in (the old) Taylor’s Bar; a great afternoon barstool. Just away from the window, perfect for a crossword, to look out at a rainy Dominick Street, or over the bar to inimitable Una.

Down the road, the barstool at the very far end of the Blue Note used to have my arse-groove worn into it.

A freezing cold midweek afternoon in Neactain’s middle bar, on the barstool facing the coal fire; steam from the wetness of my jacket, staring at Boske’s fantastic festival posters.

To this day, any barstool downstairs at The Crane.
A rare place indeed.
Long may it last as it is.

So much of our society, from supermarket shopping to housing and holidays is geared towards couples and families, it’s a tragedy that we happy lone individuals are denied the chance to sit alone in silence, with our backs turned to the world, or have a good old chat with a bar person or the punter sitting next to us.

My late father, gordlovehim, who drank with and talked to locals and strangers alike, would definitely have said:

“More life destroyed by progress.”



©Charlie Adley
14.05.2025

Thanks, Colyoomistas! We're over the half million mark!

 

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.

Have a browse around.

Thanks!

Thanks - you gave me a home!

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.

 

It’s absurd to say I was running out of countries, but that’s how it felt. I’m still yet to set foot on Africa or South America, but in my life’s hunt for a home, Ireland was looking like my destination.

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