`You know the way the French throw a cock on to the pitch when they're here?" The taxi driver produced this non sequitur as if it made perfect sense. I gaped at his back - not that I could see his back very clearly in the early morning light. The French? Throw a what?
He explained as painstakingly as if I were a tourist from Mars. "The French rugby supporters, right? They have a cock as their mascot, right? Cock-a-doodle-doo, like. They bring it to matches and put it out on the pitch to raise a cheer, are you with me?"
I agreed I was with him. We swung around the corner of St Stephen's Green and as we headed towards the Concert Hall, he rolled down his window.
"Listen," he instructed.
On cue, it came.
"Cock-a-doodle-doo."
In the middle of the city, a cock crowing at dawn. A leftover cock, according to the driver.
"I don't know whether the French bring them with them or just buy them when they get here, but they leave them in the Green and there's a whole flock of them in there now. Hens and a cock. Would you like to see them?"
I cowered in the back seat at the prospect, and he shrugged and drove on. I couldn't tell him that I'd be more likely to run the bulls at Pamplona than say hello to a crowd of French-speaking hens in St Stephen's Green, the reason being that, for as long as I can remember, I have a phobia about birds.
I don't mean that I dislike birds. Or that I have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to birds.
I mean that I have a full-scale, paralysing, shameful, disabling, irrational phobia about birds. All birds. If it has feathers, it panics me. Even a down-filled duvet sends me into full retreat. If a bird sheds a feather into my garden, I'm housebound until some family member - or a persuadable An Post person - arrives to remove it.
Nor is this panic a fluttery series of worried thoughts, flitting timidly through my mind. It takes the form of instantaneous catatonia. A loud static noise in my head drowns out every sound and thought. Every limb locks in position, immovable. Like that woman in the Bible who looked back and drew the penalty as a result, I become a pillar of salt. Me and Lot's wife: unmoving statues.
It happens without notice. I remember on one occasion finding myself being talked to gently by a perfect stranger who had noticed me frozen in response to a bird landing on the footpath five feet in front of me. The kindness of strangers - or at least one stranger - got me unstuck.
The problem with owning a fully-grown phobia is that non-phobics always assume a phobia is only an exaggerated fear. So they tell you they understand, and produce, as evidence of their fellow-feeling, how they really aren't that gone on earwigs. Their dislike of earwigs, compared with my phobia about birds is roughly the same as comparing an anthill to Mount St Helens in full eruption.
Some people take a tough-love, get-agrip approach, which makes them feel great. All it engenders in the phobic is a desire, as soon as catatonia wears off, to clout the tough-lover around the ear.
Others try to make you fall in love with what you fear. They want you to watch Snow White in that Disney animation, singing Just whistle while you work in harmony with a bird perched on her extended index finger. On her extended index finger - a bird. This is the St Francis of Assisi approach. Even as a kid, I could see he was very selective about the winged members of his family circle. It was Brother Wren and Sister Sparrow. You never heard him talk of Cousin Vulture or Auntie Albatross.
People who don't have a phobia keep pointlessly applying logic to it, not realising that what they're doing, out of the goodness of their hearts, is applying an absolutely inappropriate method. Much the same as a friend who, hearing you say you're hungry, promises to knit you a sandwich.
It's an interesting thought, but a solution it isn't. The logicians say things like "but a sparrow can't do you any harm. Look at the size of it." I don't want to look at the size or any other aspect of it. When I see a sparrow put its head on one side, it doesn't look sweet and charming to me. It looks like a predator with designs on at least my sanity and possibly my life.
When a story appeared in this paper about a week ago, suggesting our air is so full of mobile phone signals these days that it's putting homing pigeons off their stroke, so to speak, I read it without sympathy. To hell with them, I thought. Maybe it will put people off the symbolism of releasing hordes of white doves into the air as a gesture of hope for peace if they realise the dumb doves won't go home after you release them, but will just dither around the sky getting in each other's way.
On the day that report appeared, I was in Eyre Square with a friend when she was cannoned into by an off-course pigeon which didn't even have the wit to pull up its landing gear and so scratched her scalp and removed some of her hair in its claws.
Suddenly, the thought of a world full of pigeons mobbing around, their auto-pilots on the blink, became real. I began to try to get callers off my mobile phone quickly, not wanting to disorientate any more portly projectiles.
It's not bad enough that the species is already in my thesaurus as a synonym for fool. Now the morons are going to be blundering around without mental maps, too, bumping into people like oversized bumble bees.
My family long ago did its own psychoanalytic audit trail on this phobia and worked out where it came from. The received wisdom is that when I was 2 1/2, when sickening for measles and in search of some place of retreat and comfort, I spotted the little door of the hen-house at home.
It must have looked like the doors in all the drawings in a child's book: behind it lay security. Except that, in reality, behind it was a maelstrom of fat flustered smelly hens, screeching and flapping in a fog of flying feathers.
It took the family a couple of hours to find me there and rescue me. But knowing the root of a phobia does not remove the phobia. I suppose I could go through one of those gradual exposure programmes that de-sensitise you over time, but hearing Bibi Baskin on the radio the other day talking about how her fear of water came back because, having conquered it, she didn't keep swimming regularly, I'm not sure that's the right approach. If I were to get a grip on the phobia, I don't know that I'd want to have to keep a bird with me all the time to prevent re-infection.
Living with claustrophobia or agoraphobia is crippling, but living with bird phobia (avianphobia?) is possible. You just keep an eye on the sky for any silent dive-bombers, avoid holiday locations involving points like St Mark's Square, Hyde Park or Capistrano, and check, when you're invited to dinner, if the hosts keep a budgie. It may seem a little ungracious, responding to an invitation, to say "it's me or the budgie", but us phobics have no choice.