"Come on, " says her father as he ducks his head around the living room door. "Outside.

No way you're lying in front of that thing on a day like that. Get away up the yard there.

There's any amount of things you can be at."

The brevity of her resistance amounts to acceptance of its futility. The joys of the school holidays.

No arguing with the man's point all the same. Within the confines of the farmhouse at Toberona Stables is no place to be this morning as outside lads lead horses here and yon under a benign dictator of a sun.

There are workmen plastering walls and clearing the driveway of loose stones; various cars arrive and leave in apparent rotation; an assortment of dogs scamper around what ankles they can find. All is summer hubbub, the work of preparation. For tonight in Limerick, for next week in Galway, for the season ahead and all it will hold.

Check in on Paul Nolan's yard a couple of months ago and outwardly the scene would have been much the same. But there are times when appearances are easier kept up than spirits and the week of Punchestown was one of them. It had nothing to do with the fortunes of racehorses either.

He plops two cups of coffee down on the kitchen table and tries to wrap words around what it was to lose Dary Cullen, the young jockey killed in a point-to-point at Wexford that Sunday. "It's so tough for a family, " he says. "To think that a son can be killed in a sport. I don't know how people get over it. I don't know how people cope with losing young people in car crashes either. It's all stuff that seems so insignificant."

Cullen was only 20. He'd arrived at Nolan's yard outside Enniscorthy three years previously, the son of a former jockey having a go at becoming one himself. He was a quiet kid, shy and polite and friendly. For the first couple of months, Nolan found him a room at his next-door neighbour's house and the family there took to him so well as to make lodger status sound laughably cold. After a few months, he moved into town with a couple of the other lads but though spreading his wings, his homing instinct remained sound. When Nolan and his wife Catherine would go away for the weekend, he was the one they got to mind the house for them.

"He was a great young chap when he arrived here. Funny, he actually told us that he had a lot of experience riding horses but all it took was one look at him up on one to realise that he'd barely ridden a horse in his life before he got here. But I didn't mind that at all . . . it showed what balls he had more than anything to come along and decide he wanted to do it. He was a hardy and tall sort of a chap and so we gave him a go. But I remember the first time we saw him up on a horse we were going, 'Jesus Christ, this fella's never so much as been on the back of a pony heading up the Gap Of Dunloe.' But he knuckled down to it and grafted into the place very quickly. He was a great chap to work."

Even though the boy knew his claim to expertise had tweaked the needle on the polygraph, he made light of it. In time, it even earned him a nickname. Around the yard, they took to calling him 'In The Blood' because even though he couldn't ride worth a lick when he started off, the fact that his father Jimmy had been a good jockey back in the day sustained him. "He'd keep telling the lads that if he kept at it, he had to make it one day.

He'd be going, 'Sure isn't it in my blood?' He said it that often that after a while, we all called him it."

Bit by little bit, he came on along the road.

You could state that the hours were long and the work was hard but that would be to imply that the reverse was ever a possibility. It wasn't and Cullen never asked for it to be. His enthusiasm for the life was boundless, so much so that Nolan actually advised against taking out his licence when he did, thinking he'd benefit from another year in the yard. "I think now that he was probably right to ignore me and follow his own heart on it because once you take out the licence, it fairly puts the gun to the head. You have a different mindset . . . you're not just a rider at home in the yard now and you have to keep improving. Dary did that. He took the responsibility to heart."

He started riding in point-to-points. Nolan put him up on what he had going but because he didn't have many point-to-pointers in the yard, he let him off in the afternoons to ride for other trainers who did. He built up his poise and his confidence and in March of this year he rode his first winner, a horse called Clonroche Queen doing the honours at Tipperary. Six weeks later, on 23 April, he was riding the favourite in a mares' maiden at Wexford's point-to-point meeting when his horse hit a fence and landed awkwardly, killing him almost instantly. He left behind him two parents, four sisters, a brother, a girlfriend and a godson.

"It was just one of those freaky things that happens, " Nolan says quietly. "He got hit in the wrong spot. There was no mark on his face; he got no cut or anything. It was just a kick in the wrong spot. He had no chance. No chance."

They couldn't stop all the clocks. They couldn't cut off the telephone. Brigid and Lucy and all the other dogs about the place still barked, still had their juicy bones. Punchestown was looming and even if it hadn't been, there was still no other option but to keep going. You can close a pub for a bereavement and you can flip the sign in a shop door's window. You can't shut down a yard.

"It's amazing the way the life is. We were riding out here the very next day and Dary's name was still up over his saddle in the tack room. Someone else was riding out on his horses. That's the way it has to be in this business. The work on horses has to be done the same as any other day. They don't know there's anything different going on."

The staff knew though and the effects are still there to be dealt with. Nolan tells the story of one of the lads in the yard, a 17-year-old called Barry O'Neill. The pair were close friends and the day before it happened, Cullen had rung him to ask for the lend of his new saddle to ride in the race at Wexford.

"But then when Dary was killed in it, the young lad didn't know what he should do with it. Should he leave it in on the coffin?

Should he burn it? Should he hang it up and never ride it again? I told him about a friend of mine, Eddie Hales, whose friend was killed riding and Eddie rides out in his friend's saddle every day so that every time he tags a horse, he gets a little thought of his friend. And I told Barry that that's the same way he'll be.

Every morning he puts that saddle on a horse, he'll think of Dary. So the saddle is sitting in on the rack in there and it's being ridden out on every day."

Little things to help move on. Last Friday week, a plaque was unveiled before racing at Wexford in Cullen's memory. Now, the first big fixture of the season is coming round the corner. Galway has been good to Nolan in the past, the Galway Hurdle wins of Say Again (2002) and Cloone River (2004) helping the lighting technician pick him out as he first began to appear on the national stage. Now, he has another with a fine chance in Cuan Na Grai, although he feels it should have a better one and would have if the handicapper hadn't been as impressed with his win over not especially world-beating opposition at Limerick last month.

But he'll keep on keeping on and gets only a little worked up about it. It matters but other things in life matter too. Always will.