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In 1923 an almost unknown writer called Ernest Hemingway travelled to Spain to visit the equally obscure Fiestas de San Fermin. The Sun Also Rises was the turning point for them both and now a million devotees arrive in the little city of Pamplona every year to check out what has since become known as the hell-raising capital of the world.

Still drunk on the manly smell of oiled leather and cordite – or just drunk – the aspiring writer had come in search of inspiration in the world of bulls: ‘the only place where you could see life and death, ie violent death, now that the wars were over.’ Violent death is still a preoccupation for many of the desperados and debauchees who make their way to the old town hall at 7:30 each morning to test themselves in front of six charging bulls.

Those who can focus their thoughts at all are aware that they are gamblers in a potentially very serious game. As the clock on the tower clicks slowly – maddeningly slowly – towards 8 o’clock, the odds seem to be stacking increasingly against you: the early morning dew has settled as a greasy layer on the cobbles; the crowd seems thicker (and more alcoholic) than ever; the ankle that you twisted during last night’s salsa session is stiffening up. All these signs take on the significance of a personal threat and beg the perennial question. “Do I really want to be here?”

Even Hemingway – who invariably chose to study ‘violent death’ from a well-appointed balcony – never claimed that running with the bulls was the sort of activity for sensible, well-adjusted citizens. But there are few times in the course of our carefully regulated third millennia lives when you are likely to find yourself mano a mano in the high street with a 1,400lb born-to-kill monster. It is simply because it represents such ridiculous irresponsibility that so many find it irresistible.

So, you peel your sweaty palms off the morning newspaper – the bullrunner’s somewhat insubstantial equivalent of a matador’s cape – and check out yesterday’s score-line: Bulls 85 – Runners 0. An Englishman and a Madrileño (always ‘foreigners’ say the locals) were gored and the rest were treated for falls or tramplings. But, of course, they are always ‘someone else’ – that spiritual scapegoat who consistently takes the fall for all the rest of us – and, as the clock ticks onward, you try to convince yourself that today will be no different.

The stampede when it finally comes is a relief. Now all that is left to do is to try and hold your ground as the tension in the mounts towards panic pitch and the screams from five stories of balconies above your head rise to hysteria. Jumping up and down on your toes, you catch sight of a tumbling wave of white clad bodies that seems to be rolling rather than running ahead of a wall of black muscle. And you take off.

All worries are now forgotten and you run only with blind instinct. A runner falls in front of you and you leap. You glance over your shoulder and realise that the lead bull is already just behind you.

Out of the thousands who pack the streets every morning there are perhaps only a hundred who really want to run with the bulls – rather than just to be able to say that they were there. They push themselves every day to get closer to the horns and with each day that goes by they ask themselves whether they are pushing too hard…but of course ‘someone else’ always takes the fall for them. Then one day they come within inches of the ‘violent death’ that intrigued Hemingway and the game takes on a new importance.

Several years ago I dodged the weekend crowd at my usual patch in Estafeta (‘Street of a Thousand Bars’) to run on Santo Domingo hill. The bulls are faster and very aggressive here – not yet eased into the rhythm of their gallop – and even the best runners might manage only a moment in front of the horns before he dives to the side or goes down under the pounding hoofs. Traditionally, all but experienced runners avoid Santo Domingo and in the old days it was effectively ‘invitation only.’ For the first 50 metres there is no refuge whatsoever – no doorways, corners or barriers to dive through – just the towering stone walls of the old military hospital into which the wounded used to be carried once the bulls had passed.

I had made allowances for the extra speed and knew the street well but I managed only five or six steps before I had to throw myself into a grazing slide along the foot of the wall. The horn swept close over my head and sank neatly under the ribs of the runner ahead of me.

As I lay cowering in the gutter an old man – a famous veteran of several decades service in Santo Domingo – helped me to my feet and nodded towards the little alcove in the wall where the statue of a saint stands: “San Fermin ha echado el capote,” he wheezed. The people of Pamplona believe that their patron saint makes a saving pass in front of the bull with a matador’s cape to lead the bulls onwards. In the light of the numerous sins that I’d racked up over the course of the last seven days of hell-raising I wondered how this reflected on the other runner who had left most of his hair and half an ear on Santo Domingo’s tarmac. When the medics got to him only his trembling legs showed that he was still alive.

Every day San Fermin makes dozens of last-minute capotes and it is nothing short of a miracle that only 13 people have paid the ultimate forfeit in Pamplona in the last hundred years. The most recent was 22 year-old Mathew P. Tassio who was killed by a bull from the Torrestrella ranch in 1995 and the worst injury of 2003 was also the result of a collision between an American and a Torrestrella bull with the unlikely name of Pocobrío (meaning spiritless…or bovine).

Pocobrío’s horn entered the American’s anus, ripped through the rectum and perforated the bladder. With a sang froid that Hemingway would have appreciated the surgeon described his patient’s condition as “frankly…quite awkward.”

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