Róisín Ingle on summer in the city.

Newcomer on the pop block Lily Allen is intimately acquainted with the eccentric nature of summer in a big city. In LDN, her gritty paean to her home town of London, she sings about riding through the city on her bike all day "cause the filth took away my licence". But it doesn't get her down and she feels okay "cause the sights that I'm seeing are priceless".

To paraphrase 21-year-old Allen, you might laugh, you might frown, walking or cycling around Dublin town. Where I live on Dublin's North Strand, for example, the numbers of people walking around in their night clothes - night shorts are in, pyjama trousers out - appears to double in the summer. At this you have to laugh. And everyone knows the city smells worse in the summer - of urine, of truck fumes, of the Liffey. At this you frown.

Allen has the right idea. Cycling around a city in the summer you see it through different eyes. The sun is creeping through the too-thin curtains so you might take a spin out early in the morning, around 6am. The city is practically deserted, save a few early morning trucks rumbling up from the port. Around the docklands the seagulls start squawking at first light, the only soundtrack as you cycle past the new vistas of apartments and offices around Sir John Rogerson's Quay. The sun glinting off all that glass. Four cranes where 40 used to be. That, you can't help reflecting, was quick.

In the summer in the city, you notice our homeless more because they seem even more incongruous. We know them better, recognise them more easily, in the freezing cold and in the rain. They don't fit in now, not with the shiny, happy picture we've created with our pavement cafes and stripy sunburnt skin. On a bench outside Connolly Station, a man waking early shields his eyes from the sun, a flowery sheet covering him where in the winter a sleeping bag would be.

Hop on the Luas. The humidity making monsters of mothers with screaming children and ice-creams melting first onto faces and then on the floor. Couples having heated arguments in loud voices and Spanish students digging deep in matching rucksacks.

Dance music blasting from convertible cars.

Summer in the city isn't all al fresco dining and picnics in the park. But as Allen puts it: "Sun is in the sky, oh why, oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?"