IT’S Galway week next week, but not as we know it. Some of the constants will be there all right, but lots will be missing …

The people.

We’ll miss the crowds, and all that goes with them. The noise, the hum, the craic. The people, almost 130,000 of them last year. The heartbeat of Galway.

The restaurants, the bars. The straining your voice to shout an order or a bet. The straining your neck to catch a glimpse of the finish of the Plate, or the Sussex Stakes on the telly.

The movers, the fashionistas, the shakers, the sports stars, the pop stars, the screen stars.

The owners.

It’s not going to be easy for those who have skin in the game, who have paid the training fees for the last 12 months, some of them with the express objective of getting an owner’s badge at Galway, and standing in the parade ring before the race, with the possibility of landing in the winner’s enclosure (see below) afterwards.

The betting ring, the bookies. Those for whom Galway week constitutes a significant proportion of their annual turnover, some of them dependent on it, for whom survival is determined by it. An empty square between the parade ring and the stands where millions change hands in a normal year. Maybe the jockeys will park their cars there.

The cheering. The shouts from the stands as they pass with a circuit to go in the Hurdle, the roar as leaders duel up the stands rail in the Plate. The atmosphere that is like a roof. The whispers, the one that’s fancied, the one that isn’t, the people who know. They won’t be there.

The three-card trick man. If you saw him for the first time outside Dundalk Racecourse when you were, oh I don’t know, eight or nine, and you thought that it was easy, you should have thought again.

If you watched his hands closely, followed the Queen as she danced her way around the other two cards, knew where she would be every time she revealed herself.

If you watched as others made easy money – bet a score, show the lady, win a score – and gesticulated frantically to your grandfather so that you and he could join in the gold rush, you shouldn’t have been surprised when he shook his head and smiled: “C’mon son, let’s go home.”

Nor will the Toblerone bars be there, nor the bags of fruit, with a few extra apples thrown in. You’ll just have to buy the chocolate in the shop on the way home.

THERE will be a winner’s enclosure all right, but it won’t be the Galway winner’s enclosure that we know.

There’ll be no syndicate members jumping around the place, no Seamus Freney lifted into the winner’s enclosure over the rail, no Mick Winters carried shoulder high.

You’ll just have to imagine the singing.