Andy Dufresne had two options in The Shawshank Redemption — either get busy living or get busy dying. He got busy living after he got busy digging a tunnel to freedom.
Patsy Kerrhad had two options in his own life — either listen to wife snore every night for the rest of his life or get busy digging his own tunnel to freedom. So Patsy dug. And dug. And dug for over fifteen years. His tunnel took him to a place better than Andy’s beach — it led to the bar across the street from his house.
Patsy had a perfect plan except for one small detail — while Andy Dufresne crawled through a pipe of shit to make his escape, Patsy dug around those piped and cause them to collapse. That’s when county officials came snooping around and uncovered Patsy’s tunnel.
Patsy came clean about his underground railroad to free himself from the chains of a snoring spouse.
“The wife has a bad snore on her and after watching the Shawshank Redemption on RTE one night in 1994, I decided to do something about it so I waited til she was in a deep sleep and then set about digging a hole under the bed in the direction of the pub. I used all manner of tools from spoons to a heavy duty tunnel boring machine I managed to sneak down there when she was at the shops. It wasn’t until 2009 that I hit the jackpot and came up through the women’s toilet mop and bucket room.
To be honest I was sort of glad I was caught. She was always smelling drink off me in the morning and I was explaining it away as a natural odour. But recently I was finding myself singing rebel songs and stuff coming back up the tunnel and it was only a matter of time before I was caught anyhow. The landlord was also wondering how I was just appearing out of nowhere at the same time every night and disappearing from the women’s toilets.”
And on the wall of that ladies room, just before his last visit, he wrote “Patsy was here.”
And under it I wrote “Chris was too.”