The Oracle at the Adelphi
By David Gardiner
It was only when Satan Coil died that any of us discovered that Satan hadn't been his real name. He died in 1956, the year that the Russian tanks rolled in to Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution. Of course the Hungarian Revolution was of no concern to me, I was nine years old and what I cared about was my new black Raleigh Junior bicycle, the TV set with the huge mahogany cabinet and the miniscule, blurry and often rolling black-and-white picture, and the Glenalough Adelphi, the local cinema that was owned and managed by Satan, where my friends and I spent every Saturday afternoon, transported to other lands, other times and other lives by the magic of the flickering screen.
The idea of a cinema being owned and operated by Satan was one
