This health and safety stuff is pure bull

Fussy Eurocrats and their regulations wouldn't get within a bull's roar of the fiesta in a small corner of Spain in early September.

“Will you be running with the bulls at the fiesta?” The question was being put to me in a quiet bar in a remote village in northern Spain. I had been watching a football match on television and had got into conversation about football and then sport in general with a Real Madrid football supporter.

Then he added, “Two men were killed in Ampuero last year. One was caught in the chest and one in the throat. The bulls turned back and ran the wrong way. That is when it is most dangerous.”

Until that moment I had always thought that the Spanish custom of macho men running in front of bulls and immortalised by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Sun Also Rises, was something from the past. How wrong I was.

The tradition of running with the bulls goes back in history to around 1590. A decade later, at the turn of the 1600s fearless young men found it helped to speed up the passage of the bulls from their enclosure to the arena if they ran in front of them. And so the running with the bulls caught on like wildfire throughout Spain..

Hemingway wrote about the San Fermin festival of Pamplona which now attracts tourist from all over the world and is becoming more and more poplar every year. Most people now think San Fermin is the only festival of its kind. But similar bull-running events are held in many other Spanish towns. One very popular festival but little known by tourists is at the small town of Ampuero mentioned by my friend in the bar, which is just up the road from where one of my daughters has built a holiday home on a mountainside.

It was here I was staying with my wife Barbara, our son Tony and his wife Helen and Helen’s aunt Nora, a remarkable eighty-plus ready-for-anything Irish lady. After my conversation in the bar we decided we would all go to Ampuero and have a good look at what the running of the bulls was all about. So on the day of the Fiesta, September 8, the feast day of the Birthday of the Blessed Virgin, we made the short drive to Ampuero.

Earlier that morning the lady who daily delivered our fresh bread sticks arrived with the bread wearing the traditional dress for the running of the bulls: white trousers and trainers and white shirt with red neckerchief.

“Are you going to the fiesta?”

“Si, si,” she replied and I got the impression that everyone was going.

“Are you running?”

She laughed. “Ah! No, no.” I was to learn that whether running or just watching, people dressed specially for the occasion in the traditional garb. As we walked into the centre of Ampuero we saw whole families, fathers mothers and several children all dressed in white and wearing the red neckerchiefs.

Numerous bands were marching around playing and as we passed along the narrow streets we found ourselves like everyone else swaying to the traditional Spanish music and every so often breaking into a little dance. Everywhere there were happy faces and a sense of anticipation.

The bull-running festival was clearly a popular family event. Many people believe that the increasing popularity of the Pamplona festival with Europeans is a reaction against the never-ending health and safety regulations coming from the present European Union and the army of health and safety experts that it has spawned. It is these officials who are now responsible for decreeing many weird and barmy things affecting people in all walks of life. In England they were responsible for the chopping down of a magnificent row of horse-chestnut trees. This was a health and safety measure to prevent, they said, chestnuts falling on people’s heads.

More recently was their much-publicised interference in pageant to honour England’s great naval hero Nelson. They solemnly laid down that the actor playing the Victor of the Battle of Trafalgar had to wear a life jacket when he climbed from a rowing boat on to a barge in case he fell into the water.

As we waited behind the wooden barriers for the running of the bulls to start the health of safety inspectors of Europe became the subject of conversation. “The Spanish like to uphold the freedom of the individual,” one retired lady with us in the crowd behind the barriers explained. “There is nothing more important than the freedom of the individual and the respect of personal freedom,” she proclaimed. “The European bureaucrats better keep their noses out of our bull running festivals.”

A gentleman nearby joined in the conversation by suggesting that it would be a good idea if all the health and safety experts were gathered together and put to run in front of the bulls. Another gentleman pointed that we should first consider that the fact a bull weighs about 600 kilos -- some 120 stone (1,680 pounds)-- and has two big rock-hard horns which can cut through practically anything. Our little group considered these facts and then agreed that having health and safety experts run before the bulls was an even better idea than we had originally thought.

It is now a few minutes before noon. The runners I noticed were all male. What a wonderful opportunity this would have been for feminists to show that they were the equal of any man by running shoulder to shoulder with them in front of the bulls. But sadly to say there was not a feminist in sight.

The runners are now nervously pacing around, rubbing their hands and trying to look calm and nonchalant. But they keep looking back in the direction the bulls will come from. A band marches down to the arena past where we are standing and then the bandmen and women shoulder their instruments and file in behind the wooden barriers and join us.

It’s noon. A rocket goes off to indicate the bulls have been released. Then a second rocket to let everyone know that all the bulls are now in the street. Charging bulls seem to appear from nowhere. Some runners run a few paces and then frantically fling themselves on to the eight feet high wooden barrier and scramble up it, helped by the people sitting on top of them. Some runners swerve and somehow dodge the bulls. Others carry on running for another twenty or twenty five yards before leaping on to the barriers.

The next minute bulls have gone and the crowd seems to give a collective sigh of relief and there is silence.

Then a few minutes later the bulls are back -- led by runners who have started near the end of the course and are running literally for their dear lives to get into the arena and behind the safety barriers before the bulls can reach them.

A third rocket goes up. The bulls are back safely in the arena.

“You must now come in the arena,” the lady who had instructed us on the importance of the respect for human freedom told us. “You will enjoy it. There will be no killing. People will try out their skills on the young bulls.. Come.” And she insisted that we go with her and paid for our tickets.

All around the inside of the arena were young men waiting for a bull to be let loose on them. A large wooden gate at the far end opened and a young bull with huge curved horns appeared and immediately charged at the first person in sight.

He immediately fled and leaped up, grabbed the rails round the arena and pulled himself to safety. The bull continued circling the arena and men, some quite middle-aged waited for the bull to attack and then fled before it and hastily climbed to safety in the stands. One middle-aged man was not fast enough climbing back and the bull caught his legs with its horns. But shortly afterwards he was back in the ring.

After going several times round the arena the bull had managed to empty it apart from two cheeky fellows, one in a red shirt and one in a yellow shirt. These were the professionals. “Toro! toro!” they called out to it and waved. The bull pawed the sand and charged. At the last second they moved out of its path and the bull went hurtling past. Then the two joined hands and when the bull was upon them parted and the bull shot between them.

“Toro, toro,” they cried.

This time the bull pawed the sand even more angrily and charged with greater speed and determination. The man in red stood his ground and as the bull lowered its horns to savage him he leaped high into the air and the bull ran under him. The bull pulled up, saw the man the yellow jersey and charged him. He had a different technique. He did a sort of sideways long-jump over the charging bull.

We were all on our feet applauding. It was far more exciting and entertaining than watching football. We later learned that no one had been injured during the running of the bulls, though in England four people had died running a half marathon.

When the exploits in the arena were over everyone happily went off for a few glasses of wine and beer. And the bands played on. Our little group’s verdict was that the Spanish certainly know how to enjoy their feast days. And that the Anglo Saxons seem, by comparison, quite miserable and puritanical.

William Keenan is a British author and a former investigative journalist with the Daily Mirror in London.