As a kid, I used to love when the circus came to town. Early one morning, there would be the ping-ping ping of the tent pegs being driven into the ground in The Green, just behind my home house in Ballinrobe. We would go to school excited with the thought that by the time we ran home at lunchtime across the town for a quickly-consumed dinner (dinner in the middle of the day people, you see ), the town park would have been transformed into something colourful and magical and so very different from the nothingness that was normally there.