DANNY Morrison is sitting with the feet up this week after completing a 200-mile cycle of the Portuguese Camino in just six days, finishing at the Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
"It's been on my bucket list since my son Kevin and friends walked the much longer route," he said.
"I'm 71 now and wanted to do it while I was still young!" he joked.
Speaking about his preparations Danny said: "My friend Jim Gibney and I have been cycling for many years but the lads in Slane Cycles had me well prepped. I'd no problem doing it on my own at my own pace."
The former Sinn Féin director of publicity and writer has been busy in recent years having established with Elsinor, his German publisher, the Greenisland Press imprint which has published books on Algeria, the media, Ireland, a poetry collection and prison memoirs.
"I'll be publishing three books in May, to be followed by the late Rita O'Hare's memoir in August which I was editing with her at the time of her death a year ago.
GRUELLING: Danny hit the open countryside on his cycle through Portugal and Spain last week
"In the Felons, on May 3, as part of the club's sixtieth anniversary celebrations we will be launching Gino Mac Cormaic's new book about publications produced by prisoners, 'Captive Columns'. Then I'll be launching two novels in West Belfast: 'McCoubrey' by Mark B. McCaffery, a hilarious coming-of-age story set in Portadown in 1971; and 'Longlines' by Caoilte Breatnach, a very mature political thriller about an on-the-run IRA Volunteer who is called back to Ireland to help 'sell' the ceasefire."
Danny said he'd timed his Camino cycle to fall between copy-editing the books and publication dates.
"My friend Gerry Adams has a saying, 'Don't let the oul lad in,' which means postpone old age as long as you can and don't submit to it. Having said that, he probably plagiarised it from Leonard Cohen or Churchill – or his long-suffering amanuensis, Richard McAuley!"
