MAGAN'S WORLD:Is it okay to have a crush on a 76-year-old? Because I had a serious one on Dervla Murphy, Ireland's most extraordinary and intrepid voyager since Saint Brendan, writes Manchán Magan
I dreamed about her for many years. I tried not to, but I couldn't help myself. She's come riding across the bleak Afghan wasteland towards me on her trusty old bike, or on a mule over the Andes. I wanted to think of something devastatingly clever to top say that would make her dismount and join me over by the campfire, so that we could talk and share ideas all night.
In the Ireland that I grew up in Dervla was the lodestar for anyone dreaming of exploring the world. She made it seem so easy. For her 10th birthday she received an atlas and a bicycle and decided to cycle to India. The trip had to wait 22 years, but when she finally made it, in 1963, she wrote a fantastic account, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle. Every year after that she'd make another journey and write another book: In Ethiopia with a Mule, On a Shoestring through Coorg, Where the Indus is Young.
I had heard it was next to impossible to get to see her; either she was off wandering far away or else holed up in her medieval market compound, in the heart of the Co Waterford town of Lismore, writing the next book. Yet through a wonderful stroke of fortune I managed to arrange a meeting last summer. I was terribly excited, especially about getting to see her home, which is like a caravanserai you might find along the Spice Route - although I regretted having to bring a radio producer and researcher along, to record our interview, as it somewhat compromised the intimacy.
I wanted to gush about the effect that reading her books had on me at the age of 16 and how I had devoured all of them, especially the ones with her daughter, Rachel. I felt I sort of knew them both at this stage, having followed Rachel from her first trip to southern India, at the age of six, right up to the madcap journey through the Andes with a mule when she was 15. I was amazed to hear that Rachel is now married with children of her own - and, of course, is still travelling. Occasionally the three generations set off together; last year they went to Cuba to research Dervla's latest book.
The visit passed all too quickly, and before I knew it I was back on the road again, driving over the Knockmealdowns, purring at the memory of Dervla's humility and hospitality - and of the wonderful earthy soup she made us with vegetables from her garden.
It was only later that night, as I was listening back to the tape, that I finally began to take onboard what she had been trying to tell me all afternoon. She wanted us to know that, as far as she could see, the world was going steadily downhill. "As long as this corporate capitalism prevails there is very little to celebrate in the world," she said. "It's very sad."
This wasn't something I wanted to hear from Ireland's greatest adventurer. Instead I was hoping to hear her waxing about the multitudinous expressions of humanity she had encountered and the awe-inspiring realms that she describes so evocatively in her books. I tried, with the crassest of interviewing techniques, to steer her away from her gloom, but after a lifetime dealing with cantankerous militias and tribesmen she wasn't going to be put off by the likes of me.
The truth was that a lifetime of travel had left her feeling more alienated than ever. "I am getting more and more pessimistic," she said. "[I have] deep, deep concern; great anxiety that the young won't be allowed to see what is happening."
manchan@ireland.com