I had never been up so early in my life. It was 1983 and Martin Parr, the great photographer who died on Saturday, had asked me to write the text for a planned book of his images from the west of Ireland, published the following year as A Fair Day. He was still working on them and I went with him to the Mayflower ballroom in Drumshambo and then on to the horse fair at Maam Cross.
We shared a room in a B&B in Connemara and I will never forget the shock of him dragging me out of bed at half past fecking five. He was a lovely, warm, gentle man but he was not going to be delayed by my tardiness.
I couldn’t understand why we had to be at Maam Cross for six o’clock when there was nobody there. Only gradually did it dawn on me that it was crucial to his strategy that people arriving over the next few hours should find this tall gangling Englishman already there. They would take in his oddness and shove it to the back of their minds. He would be part of the day’s scene – at once very obvious and easily disregarded.
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