Out early to the strand one morning last week, the shadows still long in the dunes, Ethna and I found the tideline glistening with jellyfish - hundreds of big compass jellyfish, with sepia rays and scalloped rims. Our first, regretful, thought was: "Oh, what a good shot that would have made!" And then: "Thank goodness we don't have to take it!" After more than a year of watching the world through the lens of a video camera, it is good to meet life again with fresh, uncalculating eyes.
From time to time throughout the 24 years of "Another Life", my weekly Irish Times chronicle from a Co Mayo hillside, some sympathetic soul in RT╔ has sought to film the alternative lifestyle the Vineys were carving out for themselves.
The early years, with the goats and hens, beehives and a pony, must have seemed the most visually promising.
We held off - not wanting, in a local phrase, to "put ourselves forward" quite that much, or to have a camera crew dogging our wellington boots around the acre; our own years of television work had taught us what to expect. It was the era of popular books (with jokey titles)about "self-sufficient" lifestyles and of The Good Life series, played for laughs on television.
Then the column began to change, partly because The Irish Times had had enough of compost-heaps and muck-shifting, partly because our lives had moved into a new phase, a new and deeper relationship with nature and the insights of ecology. This progression became the stuff of my book, A Year's Turning. It was Joe Mulholland, on the eve of his retirement from RT╔, who made us the unrefusable offer: that we should film, with our own hands, a year-round view of the seasons and our own lives in Thallabawn. He sent us a camera - one of those dinky, featherweight, digital toys, almost but not quite idiot-proof - and the result is the four-part series, A Year's Turning, which begins on RT╔ on August 15th.
It is not only the cameras that are changing in television, but the way they look at people. Viewers fresh from Big Brother or Treasure Island will find the Vineys at home a bit tame: not even a confessional camera in the greenhouse. Unless the sex life of frogs and snails turns you on, or glimpses of scrawny legs in the waves, the programmes are distinctly short on voyeurism.
And after two decades, what of the reasons we swapped those Dublin media careers for a simpler life beneath a mountain? How much sense will they make, a whole generation on? In a way, they must seem old hat, just as we may seem, to the Tiger cubs, just a pair of daft wrinklies living in a wood. But we were early recruits to the organic growing of vegetables; and, in a revolt against consumerism, to the search for more frugal and sustainable ways of living (before that word became a message for the world). We were part of a movement, disparate yet instinctive, that found a certain international solidarity with the coming of the Internet, the ultimate global village.
Who now needs to call organic gardeners cranks? What's new about an electronic cottage (though we pre-dated computers!) or families dropping out by choice because of metropolitan stress and complexity? Over the years, scores, if not hundreds of new settlers have moved west - some, perhaps, tempted by the weekly nudge of our example. Others, now, are moving their lives abroad, to make more sensible lives in the sun.
In every generation, the same choices remain, about beauty and freedom and personal command of time. Nothing of that has changed, at any level in the high-rise capital city I have not set foot in for half-a-dozen years. Not one of its millionaires lives as well as we do. For the great mass of people, freedom is still doled out, or packaged as a tourism product, in a few weeks' holiday a year.
Our own original luxury was not to be seriously afraid of failure, of doing without things, or occasionally being a bit skint: our skills were portable. The old black-and-white photographs we have dropped into the films remind us of the early reality of a draughty labourer's cottage in a bleak, thistled field.
For at least a decade, we felt we had just arrived, so profound was the impact of novelty. Some rural readers of the column grew irritated by what they saw as a pretentious experiment with what were mostly, after all, the largely discarded chores of rural life (mowing with a scythe, threshing barley on a rock, humping turf across the bog on our backs): what did we think we were trying to prove? I have sometimes wondered that myself. I did it to find out if I could, I suppose, just as Ethna (who, after all, spent her childhood on a small farm in Cavan) revived her mother's skills, with bees and wine-making and baking in a turf-fired range because she knew how to. We also both believed firmly in getting things out of books.
It would be nice to think that our daughter Michele, wrenched out of Dublin at eight years old, understood something of what moved us at that time. She has forgiven us a fairly lonely childhood, solaced by her Connemara pony, Bain∅n (who has gone on to greater things). Editing our films on computer, in the high-tech ambience of Telegael in Spiddal, I wonder what secret emotions were stirred by my lyrical treatment of the unyielding landscape she rode through? The acre, meanwhile, is greatly changed. The first wooden windbreak fences in a bare field are now the hidden bones of a maze of fuchsia hedges. Within their shelter, seedling trees have grown up to engulf the old hen-house and shade out the asparagus.
Honeysuckle sprawls across the goatshed in The Hollow.
As we grew older, both the need and the capacity for physical experiment grew less: we have not, after all, become the wiry gnomes, still cutting turf, that I, at least, may have pictured. To pay for new windows, a proper roof and central heating, we were tempted back to the satisfactions of documentary film-making.
These did not entirely equip us, however, for A Year's Turning: The Movie. Our little Panasonic camera, marvellously miniature, was no match for the full-scale telephoto lens of a wildlife cameraman. And even if it were, nothing could turn me overnight into an Eamon de Buitlear: I had never so much as held a camcorder, We were not, therefore, in the Big Close-Up league, peering into a peregrine's nest or down an otter's tonsils. We would follow Joe Mulholland╣s invitation to "show nature as you see it", in the incidental detail of insects and plants, the casual glimpses of animals and birds. Lacking the grace and steady hands of youth, we sent for a big, heavy tripod and cut holes in a rucksack to carry it around.
Where is an otter when you need one? All our encounters over the years have happened entirely by chance and, in between, we have been happy to live with the tracks that lace the sand between sea and dunes. Short of camping out in a hide for hours on end (one's knees get so stiff!), it seemed we must rely on "the flow", the sort of trust in serendipity that got us through our first, lean years.
And thus, while filming stationary snails in a crevice of a rock above the shore, we were rewarded by an unaware otter below, who gave us a whole breathless minute of bounding movement. What seemed, at times, to be special gestures of goodwill from nature - the chaffinch that rashly built a nest outside our window, the lizard that turned up among the leeks - may have owed more to a heightened observation (the wren on the living-room rug, however, and the robin in the kitchen, were just out for their five seconds of fame).
Even with a year to work in, the camera in the corner demanded its regular quota of images, as the seasons drifted remorselessly by. This set up a quite new intensity of seeing, a jittery readiness with camera and tripod like a soldier snatching up his rifle. From sunrise onwards, each hint of theatre in the sky, any odd play of light on the landscape, had us both framing pictures in our mind's eye. Nothing flew, buzzed or bloomed, except in audition for our digital drama.
I tried to think small, remembering how that brilliant French film, Microcosmos, had handled a wholly insect cast. I stumbled about after butterflies and bumblebees and once spent a whole hour waiting for a hoverfly to hover in mid-air, exactly where I'd focused, to catch that stunning, jewel-like brilliance - but it never arrived in the same place twice.
The excitement of some encounters proved altogether too much. After long stalking through the dunes, I finally got close enough to curlews to pan the camera with the flock in thrilling flight - only to find I'd forgotten to press "record". As if in recompense, the camera would sometimes conjure a piece of magic almost by itself, as in the whooper swans in Autumn, dipping and dreaming on the lake in a mesh of flashing diamonds.
There may, indeed, be rather too much sunshine in "A Year's Turning". Blame a camera that mustn't get wet and that made every shot taken on a dull day look, well, very dull. Conscious of the need for truth, we did venture out, with umbrella, into torrential rain, and struggled to the shore in gale-force winds to capture foaming seas.
There are several hundred shots in four half-hours, especially now that television has trained us to have the attention-span of a gnat.
Long gone are the leisurely, lyrical meditations of Patrick Carey's nature films back in the 1960s: our swans must get a move on, our setting suns sink fast. My rapt 20 minutes of glorious goldfinches at the nuts, my slow, loving pans across the sea were slashed to seconds in the editing suite - this at the hands of my wife and daughter.
Ethna is the fixer, list-maker and problem-solver, with an eye that makes her a born producer-director. As much a novice to the camera as I, she nonetheless caught the great swoop of starlings on the duach, and sneaked out at first light to record the birds' dawn chorus. For Michele, treading in our steps as a fledgling video editor, knitting the shots together in a professional flow was an unexpected challenge, like being handed the controls a few flying-hours ahead of time. In eight tense weeks in Telegael, she threaded a triumphant path through the fits and starts and shaky movements of my amateur camerawork. Thus, A Year's Turning becomes the ultimate home movie, complete with walk-on parts for Meg, the dog.
It is, of course, a propaganda series, both for a lifestyle and for a particular view of nature. It offers an idyll of self-sufficiency pictured just a little more romantically than much of its reality: how we fish with a spillet in the tide, how we raise sweetcorn and squashes above a windy ocean. In autumn, as the apples redden, our harvest festival is a match for any supermarket.
In the second episode, Summer, we have a sequence filmed at August Bank Holiday weekend - all heat and shimmer and cars lined up on the strand. It is not, as will be obvious, our favourite time, except for the friends it brings. Poets and scientists both make guest appearances in our landscape: two sides, sometimes interchangeable, of a common enchantment with the place.
The same duality, as our series tries to show, is the central enrichment of our lives, together with a daily and ever-changing beauty.
After all these years - as I confide above the closing winter sunset - we still call each other to the window, so rich is its light and colour.
A Year's Turning is published in hardback (1996) by Blackstaff Press, £14.99 in UK; and in paperback (1998) by Penguin, £6.99 in UK. The TV series, A Year's Turning, starts on RT╔ on Wednesday, August 15th at 7 p.m. and will continue on subsequent Wednesdays at the same time.
viney@anu.ie