Travel writer MICHAEL FEWERdescribes his day
IF I'M NOT travelling, I rise about 8.15am, after It Says in the Papers. I live in Rathfarnham and I try to get a brisk walk in before I start work, to get the brain going. It may be in my local park, or in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. If we are in our holiday home in Waterford, it's a two-mile walk on glorious Woodstown Beach.
I was an architect for 30 years before becoming a writer. I deliberately got out just as the boom was starting because I was in my early 50s and didn’t want to be working seven days a week. My clients didn’t believe me, but I just always wanted to write.
I started out by producing a map of the Wicklow Way for my kids, illustrating it and putting in notes about the birds and animals they might find, or the history of a place. Someone in Gill Macmillan saw it and asked me to make a book of it.
These days I’m usually at my PC, surrounded by a mountain of reference books, images and notes by about 10am. I work on a few projects in parallel. I may be involved in the publicity and launch of one book while deep in the middle of the next, with a third, infant project hovering in the wings.
My to-do list will have a variety of tasks on it, from pruning the plum tree to arranging car hire for central Italy or making arrangements to go to Monaghan to photograph a building.
I also write and illustrate travel articles for local tourism bodies, usually concentrating on history and walking, and try to fit these trips in during spring and early summer.
This is my busiest time. Last week I was in Dingle to meet Fungi and to explore a little-known Iron Age hill fort just under Mount Brandon. Two weeks before that I was in the Spanish Pyrenees, and before that was climbing in Wales.
If I’m in writing mode I spend a couple of hours on the computer before lunch. It can be hard graft; checking sources and facts can mean a sentence can take half an hour. Other times the words just seem to flow and time flies by.
I have a light lunch with my wife Teresa and, if I don’t continue writing, I may go to the National Library for some research.
We usually have dinner at about six and, if we are not going out, a quiet night spent watching TV or reading. As an antidote to my research reading, Teresa keeps me supplied with thrillers, so many that I can’t even remember their names or who they are by.
** Michael Fewer, travel writer and author of Rambling Down the Suir
** In conversation with Sandra O’Connell