FESTIVAL DIARY:Michael Harding tours the fields of the Longford Agricultural Show

BRINGING horses to Longford Agricultural Show is no joke. Eve, who is only seven, was bringing Bella, her bay pony. Her dad did the driving.

Her friend Laura was up at six on Saturday morning to make Bella all pretty, grooming and plaiting the horse’s mane.

It was going to be Eve’s first big show. She was competing in the “Leading-rein class for ponies – to be ridden by children under eight.” I was hoping to meet her. I knew she would love the Alice in Wonderland magic of an agricultural show.

There was a fortune teller in a camper van. Her poster asserted that she was the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter of a true Roma gypsy.

Outside her caravan there happened to be a true Roma woman, in a long white dress, selling Spiderman balloons.

In the prize-winners’ tent, there were tables of giant vegetables. The winning cabbage was the size of a small shrub. There were tea cosies, cushions, eiderdowns and porter cakes, jewellery and lace, buns and jams, pots of honey, huge onions and enormous sticks of rhubarb.

There were butter beans that reminded me of the first summer of my daughter’s life, when I went mad in the garden.

Outside the tent, half a dozen Civil Defence volunteers squashed into the rear of their own ambulance.

I chatted to a beekeeper. His bees were buzzing in a honeycomb encased in glass. The queen had a white streak of Tipp-Ex on her back.

“She can lay 3,000 eggs a day,” he said. “It’s pure magic. I’m 40 years keeping them. I go down to the garden a dozen times a day, just to make sure they’re alright.”

At another stall, a man was selling fudge. The banner above him proclaimed, “Man of Aran”. He was from Inis Oírr, originally.

“What brought you to the midlands?” “An old white van,” he said.

I said: “I’ll take some fudge for the wife.” He said: “You’re the fifth person today who bought that woman something; she’ll be sick of fudge.”

All across the field there were stalls decked with balloons, and horses of every colour and size, and pedigree dogs swanking about like Hollywood celebrities.

There were purple hens and white cocks in a cage, and candyfloss, and an ice-cream van, and a tent offering pints of Guinness.

There was a stall selling coffins for pets; miniature caskets with satin interiors, and small pillows, on which lay plastic roses.

But nowhere could I find Eve, or her pony.

There were girls in miniskirts and pink wellies, and ladies in jodhpurs and riding boots, sitting up on frisky horses with brushed tails and shimmering haunches.

The smell of burgers sizzling in the mobile chipper attracted hungry farmers.

My anxiety about my overdraft, and the cash I need to get through August, gradually faded away, as I stepped back into medieval Ireland; a field of beasts, a man wiping a cow’s rear end, a boy washing a bullock’s flank, a woman combing a calf’s tail.

Jeeps rumbled quietly over the lumpy grass, while the clouds above threatened to explode.

Two Romanian girls, in purple and pink dresses, down to their ankles, played with an infant, and gold dangled from their ear lobes. One of them had enough gold in her mouth to buy a farm of land.

There were Limousin cows with fur the colour of a Donegal beach on a wet day, and teddy bear eyes.

A black Aberdeen Angus tethered to the side of a cattle-box bellowed in anguish.

A little girl ran across the field and someone cried, “Don’t run; you’ll frighten the horses.” But it wasn’t Eve.

A boy with blond hair, wearing a white shop coat, was tipping the hind legs of a bullock in the ring with a long stick; he placed the stick into the crevice in the hind hoof, and the bullock stretched his legs backwards in an exquisite pose; the judge admired the flanks.

I felt the ghost of Liam O’Flaherty at my shoulder, a writer whose short stories long ago revealed to me that human beings are enthralled by other animals; a writer so diligently observant that even in hospital, before he died, he gazed at a young doctor and said: “You have beautiful eyes.”

But still no sign of Eve. I phoned her friend. She said that they had arrived too late for the leading-rein class competitions, so they turned around and drove back to Mullingar.

Eve was disappointed. “All that trouble for nothing,” she whispered wistfully, as they drove home.

But her friend said that it wasn’t the end. There would be lots of other shows; in fact, it was only the beginning.