Michael Viney's journalistic career spans over five decades and includes West End theatre criticism, Middle Eastern aristocracy, and the ditches of Thallabawn, writes Arminta Wallace.
'In the south of County Mayo," writes Michael Viney in his book A Year's Turning, "the coast road narrows between field-banks and dry-stone walls until, a mere tendril, it winds to a halt in the sands at the foot of Mweelrea Mountain. Thallabawn is one of the last townlands on this road, a stripe of hillside running down to a large and lonely strand."
The road to Viney's Acre should be familiar from its occasional guest appearances in the long-running drama that is Another Life. Driving along it, though, doubts set in just west of Louisburgh. Can it really be this narrow? Can anybody really live in this improbably beautiful place, the wind whipping the waves into a cappuccino drama of awesome proportions, the sky full of the sort of weird silvery light normally never seen outside of upmarket science fiction movies?
But here is Viney himself, waiting to greet me at the door of the house whose changes have been charted over the years, in his weekly Irish Times column. Its tiled floors, pine staircase and book-lined walls make it very different to the tiny labourer's cottage into which Michael and Ethna Viney moved a quarter of a century ago.
"It had been empty for 20 years when we moved in in 1977," says Viney. "And out there" - he waves at an exuberant tangle of branches and such foliage as February will allow - "was a bare field". The hours of sweat, tears and sheer hard graft which effected the transformation are beyond counting; but this was never a case of a pair of naïve Dubliners venturing into the wild west in search of hippy-dippydom.
"We knew what we were coming to," says Viney, with a wry grin. "What we loved most was the idea of splitting our lives between mental and physical work - and we were young enough to do that.
"I was in my middle forties. "I think that if I'd left it very much longer, my back would never have taken it."
In the month of his 70th birthday, Viney could pass for a man of a decade or more younger. He was born in Brighton, his father a carpenter who sold fish and chips until the second World War put a temporary end to seaside jaunts on the south coast of England.
"Then we moved to the edge of town, right beside the cliffs, which was where I started to catch prawns and things in tidal pools. But I had to wait for the war to end; when we first went to live there, it was all barbed wire and anti-tank defences."
Having left school with two interests - painting and writing - and a need to contribute to the family income, he found himself apprenticed to a local newspaper. "Properly apprenticed, with written indentures, from the age of 16 to 21," he recalls, with a chuckle. "I must be one of the last people who was bound in that way."
Painting wasn't seen as a realistic career option - ironic, since he is now devoting considerable chunks of time to it and, though still dubious about the prospect of a full-scale exhibition, has sold Another Life illustrations now and again at the request of readers.
After his spell on the Brighton and Hove Herald he moved to the Evening Argus, where his duties included that of theatre critic.
Did he enjoy it? "Oh, I'm sure I was unbearably precious," he says. "There I was, at 22, with the immediate pre-West End voice on things like Waiting for Godot."
After a stint on a London tabloid, Viney was recruited by Today magazine to whip what its owners saw as an ageing readership into shape. "It was, I think, what would now be called 'dumbing down'," he says. "I remember being sent to the Middle East to interview King Hussein and President Nasser - in a serious political way. And while I was waiting in Cairo with a photographer for Nasser to come back from the United Nations, I got a cable which said, 'Forget Nasser: Want Drugs and Girlies'."
He resigned shortly afterwards and, in 1961, came to Renvyle, Co Galway - with which he had been "utterly smitten" when he visited a friend there the previous winter - to write and paint. When the money ran out - "I ended up with 16 quid and the bicycle" - he made his way to Dublin, and began to write for The Irish Times.
There followed a series of investigations into what would now be called social science topics: unmarried mothers, alcoholism, young offenders. His pieces made considerable waves on the academic scene, with several of his features series later being used in booklet form as course material for students at UCD.
Ethna, meanwhile, was a researcher in RTÉ who was also deeply involved with the fledgling co-operative movement in the west of Ireland. At weekends, they made the trek to their holiday home at Thallabawn. For the 1970s, this was radical enough - but to move to the west full-time? What made them do it?
"Well, we were having a septic tank dug, and the soil looked absolutely wonderful," says Viney. "I knew you could grow things. So we started, as an exercise - or a game, almost - to work out how one could live down here, things one could do to be 'self-sufficient', which was very voguish at that time. Before I knew where I was, Ethna had more or less put it up to me that it was possible."
The rest is history, of a kind, all faithfully chronicled in Another Life: the weeding and hoeing and cutting of turf; the unsuccessful experiments in beekeeping, goats, and ducks; the semi-precious stones which never got polished and wood which never got turned; the animals and vegetable life observed from startlingly close quarters. Week after week the immaculate brown envelope was posted from the post office at Killadoon, to arrive on the desk of a sub-editor at The Irish Times at precisely the same time on precisely the same day every week.
"And in the years when we had no car, that meant cycling, no matter what the weather," Viney points out. "What a luxury, now, to be able to send it electronically - not just the copy, but the illustration as well."
Neither he nor Ethna has set foot in Dublin for at least seven years, though they travel often to Galway to visit their daughter, Michele, a freelance journalist and film-maker who is based in the city.
The years at Thallabawn have been productive in all sorts of ways. Besides serious growing of vegetables, Viney has, with considerable support from the indefatigable Ethna, made films and written books, including the highly-acclaimed A Year's Turning. His geological study of Ireland - published by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington - is due to appear shortly in the US, and will be available in Ireland from Blackstaff in the autumn. A study of Ireland's oceans is now at research stage.
But it has been the column, he says, which has taught him the most valuable lesson: that of scrupulous observation. Of all the things he has observed over the years, what has moved him the most? He ponders for a moment. "I think," he says, finally, "getting to grips with the insect world. I had a terrible phobia of spiders as a kid, and I still can't get over that completely, but I'm very happy with beetles and hoverflies, which I love - those bouncing points of light in the air.
"And plants, of course.
"I suppose what moves me most of all is the huge diversity of life - the amazing diversity of forms and foliage which you find in any tangled bit of Irish ditch. I sowed my first seeds yesterday: lettuce, tomatoes and broad beans.
"Every year I'm just a little bit nervous that I'm going to be bored by handling pots and soil and so on, but every year I open the greenhouse and this great smell of soil comes out. And the magic works every time."
A Year's Turning by Michael Viney is published by Blackstaff Press.