PAMPLONA LETTER/PATRICE HARRINGTON: Today is the penultimate day of San Fermin - Pamplona's bull-running festival made famous by Ernest Hemingway's 1927 novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, which described the nine-day event as a "wonderful nightmare".
Having witnessed it first hand myself, I'm afraid I can only agree with the latter half of that description.
It all started out so well. Our cabin on the overnight train from Barcelona was like Inspector Gadget's bedroom (complete with the proverbial pot to pee in tucked away beside the fold-out stairs to the top bunk).
In preparation for the much-anticipated visit to Navarra's capital, I had read Hemingway's book, which I felt allowed me to chicken out of running with the bulls myself.
Firstly, his description of how a bull uses its horns, " . . . left and right, just like a boxer", sounded far too accomplished for me. And as he himself didn't bother running, why should I?
Plus, I was having difficulty erasing last Friday's TV image of a matador at Pamplona being lifted aloft by his ornate bolero and tossed around in the air like a paper doll lasso.
By Sunday morning when we arrived in Pamplona, an average of seven runners a day in the previous four days of the festival had been taken to hospital; six of them with goring wounds, the rest having been butted or trampled upon.
Fourteen deaths have been attributed to the San Fermin bull runs since record-keeping began in 1924, the most recent of whom was a 22-year-old American man in 1995.
According to town lore, the practice of running with the bulls dates back to 13th century butchers who ran slightly ahead of the bulls to be well placed to buy them for slaughter after they were transported from one pen to another. As for San Fermin - he was the town's first bishop.
Our train pulled into Pamplona station at 5.30 a.m. All across the platform lay the bodies of exhausted revellers; prone, supine, starfish-shaped, in the foetal position. There is about one bed to every seven revellers in the town during San Fermin.
One girl, clearly ill-equipped for the cold, wore plastic bags inside her Jesus sandals. For comfort, a boy hugged a large Shrek toy, which I would later deduce he must have won at the 24-hour funfair. Almost everyone wore an interpretation of the traditional San Fermin costume of red neckerchief, red cummerbund, white shirt, white pants. Well, at least white before the contribution of sangria, muck, patatas bravas and half a week spent in the same clothes.
Traditional Basque ballads blared from the station bar where wobbly patrons - mostly American - sucked on cans of Cruzcampo beer with their breakfast croissant.
At 6.30 a.m., after coffee and bocadillos, we got the bus into town. We chugged past people sleeping on traffic islands, grassy verges, the pavement, beneath trees, on benches, one boy on the roof of a car, a girl with a broken leg folded into a shopping trolley.
Between the sleeping bodies was a sea of rubbish; squashed cartons of Don Simon, Don Garcia and Don Gusto vino tinto, broken San Miguel bottles, half-eaten cartons of fast-food, abandoned plastic cups of beer, plastic bags everywhere, a shoe, vomit patches.
As dawn broke over Pamplona, the multitudes in their red and white costumes, still partying since the previous night, appeared like spectres in the half-light. It was Féile with a uniform.
By 6.50 a.m. we had chosen our spot at the barricades along the bull-running route - beside the Plaza de Toros, behind the two rows of people who were already standing there.
Above me was a beautiful Sycamore tree. To my right was a boy in an England T-shirt with a finger of encrusted drool on his chin. To my left was an American youth who would fall asleep standing up, much to my fascination.
When the bull run finally began at 8 a.m., there was a two-pronged attack on my view of the proceedings.
The eejit standing right at the barricade climbed up on it and not even my politest Spanish followed by my most cheesed off would move her. Then the fattest Red Cross man in Navarra parked his posterior in the leper's squint of vision I had managed to find between two people's shoulders.
Thankfully he moved just in time for me to see the first of the red and white runners walking (yes, walking) by, cheering, looking over their shoulders occasionally.
A full 30 seconds passed before I saw the bulls ambling (yes, ambling) by with some more macho runners alongside them, followed by more who had been out-run.
It was all over in exactly two minutes and twenty-two seconds.
Earlier along the route a man had been butted in, well, his butt, and taken to hospital along with two others with superficial injuries.
Just as we turned to leave, we walked straight into a young man vomiting beside a wheelie bin. We were wearing flip flops.
Oh Hemingway, what have you done?