Sure, the stairs'd kill 'im.

Last night, I resolved to get up with the horses. Websites told me that the Smithfield horse market started just after dawn, so there I was, primed and ready at 6.20 a.m. 

Primed, ready ... and all alone.

Nothing. Not a sausage. No horses, no riders. Just me, and a very small English girl with her granny, out so as not to rouse the parents in the hotel.

And then, two kids sauntered into the square, the John Waynes of Dublin 7. 

– 'How're ye, lads?' shouted an oul fella.

– 'I'm after comin' in from fuckin' Finglas with no fuckin' breakfast, that's how,' shouted back an eleven-year-old with a dirty jacket and a grin. En route to a bacon sandwich astride his pony, I had a feeling that he had the right idea.

But Finglas? Bareback? With a rope? At five in the morning? The mind boggles. Meanwhile, I went for a wander, and witnessed the loveliness of an empty and freshly-scrubbed Dublin. I worried about last night's drunks, but met with this morning's workers.

Two trips back to the house for coffee and several hours later, we were in action. One Dublin institution underway, and one very happy parkbench with her camera.

A few more clopped in, some horseboxes, trailers and sulkies, ponies, foals and dreyhorses. I was not a little intimidated, being very afraid of horses and all, but it was a calm lot in the early morning as things slowly got underway.

Not so later when I returned with the Maternal One – it was a kind of equine chaos controlled by good faith and some handling, with enormous great whacking horses with big fat lads in tracksuits galloping full-tilt down the square, terrifying racket, small ones rearing up in little horse scuffles, and new ones pouring in from around the city, streaming in from all corners of life, across the river and down from the mountains. You could hear them – and smell them – all day, long into the afternoon, when I blinked out of my hot nap at a sharp 'heeeeyAHHH' and the clatter of chariot wheels past my caterpillar-crawly windows.