To Aran, I

To Aran, I tells how a young man from north Wales found the means to give shape a youthful dream of going to live on Inis Mór, an adventure recorded in his acclaimed first memoir An Aran Keening. 

This beautiful, high-spirited story blends moments of high farce, poetry and serious social observation, as the young McNeillie – a self-described ‘quare fellow’ – pursues his dream with a kind of fatalistic abandonment. Down but not quite out, he works his way towards Aran – first as a local news reporter on £5 a week in mining towns and villages in the Amman Valley in Wales. From there, he washes up in a condemned property at Waterloo on the Mersey shore in outer Liverpool and finally, aged twenty-one, finds himself in central London and the BBC’s Radio Newsroom at Broadcasting House. 

After amassing enough money to keep him afloat on Inis Mór for a year, he sets out and, at the end of October 1968, he waved goodbye to a highly promising career, his colleagues, friends and even to his future wife: all to fulfil a dream he had when sixteen, first looking into J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands, as if it was Chapman’s Homer and he John Keats.