Now who is this cool cat, and why is he loitering in the bushes, his bike weighed down with snazzy leather saddlebags? Could he be a character from some classy Danish TV drama series, running a mobile money-laundering operation from the great outdoors?
Silly me. It’s our own Michael Viney, columnist for this newspaper and heroic chronicler of the natural world.
The feature story informed readers, in the autumn of 1977, that “recently Michael Viney with his wife and eight- year-old daughter left Dublin for a West of Ireland cottage, where they have been facing up to the challenge they set themselves of living as self- supporting a life as they can make it”.
Lucky them, some readers must have thought; although the quizzical tone of the writer suggests that as far as she/he is concerned, the Vineys – who at the time, were well-known figures in Dublin media circles – might have gone slightly mad. The scepticism finds an echo in this image of a rather apprehensive-looking Viney, gazing into the far distance as if wondering whether he’ll make it to the edge of the Atlantic before the rain wrecks those magnificent saddlebags.
Personally, I’d have been willing to bet that a man who could come by such a smart waterproof jacket, way back in 1977, would be up for any challenge the weather might send his way.
So, happily, it proved. In regular despatches from his cottage at Thallabawn, Viney has reported on matters natural (and sadly, increasingly unnatural, in the shape of environmental degradation and climate change) with the pen of a scientist and the eye of a poet.
As his friend Michael Longley put it on the publication of Reflections on Another Life, a collection of his Saturday columns, last year: "Michael Viney has shared his locale with the world while accommodating the marvels of the earth". And it is we, his readers, who have been the lucky ones.