The rodeo is in full swing by the time we arrive. In the car park, music, pounding from speakers lashed to a telegraph pole, competes for supremacy with the thud of electrical generators. The entrance is through an enormous tent selling western wear. Chavez, citing official business of some kind, furnishes us with a meeting place, then disappears into the crowd leaving Jack, Emmy and me to explore. Here are accessories from another world. Saddles, stirrups, reins, leather chaps, walls full of tough, wicked-looking lassos; in fact pretty much anything that can be attached to a horse is on sale. The aisles are heaving with people. Families with small children clutching cotton candy and bags of fritos. Packs of slim-hipped teenage girls, identically dressed in high-waisted jeans and checked shirts knotted under their breasts; their hair either combed up into elaborate sugar confections or let loose to cascade down their backs like shiny gold ribbon. Every man, woman, child, old, young, fat and thin alike, wears a cowboy hat. Even babies in strollers have red bandannas knotted round their throats. The place is thick with the smell of leather and the chick-chack of spurs clattering by. Counting out dollars and cents, two old men hold out arthritic hands to each other and proudly compare loss of digits as though competing at a leprosy convention. ‘I was roping a steer,’ I hear one say to the other, ‘thumb came right off and rolled in the dirt. Every one of them dogs was sniffin’ and scrabblin’ for it but Tom’s big ol’ sheepdog snapped it up.’

I stop for a minute, feeling almost surreally out of place. There is something so self-contained about this world and those who belong to it. I try to imagine any single one of the people in this tent transported back to Camden High Street, but it’s hard. In London, a West Papuan in full ceremonial dress complete with nose horn would probably incite less finger pointing than a cowboy, and as they split and pass around us, I wonder if they too can tell, just by looking, that there are interlopers in their midst.

Emmy finds a jewellery stand and inveigles me into buying her a turquoise necklace and I talk Jack into trying on hats. The smallest is still a little big for his head, but he looks good and there is a definite strut to his walk as we leave the tent and head out into the glare of the main event.