We study a delay-differential analogue of the first Painlevé equation obtained as a delay periodic reduction of Shabat's dressing chain. We construct formal entire solutions to this equation and introduce a new family of polynomials (called Bernoulli-Catalan polynomials), which are defined by a nonlinear recurrence of Catalan type, and which share properties with Bernoulli and Euler polynomials. We also discuss meromorphic solutions and describe the singularity structure of this delay Painlevé-I equation in terms of an affine Weyl group of type A1(1). As an application we demonstrate the link with the problem of calculation of the Masur-Veech volumes of the moduli spaces of meromorphic quadratic differentials by re-deriving some of the known formulas.
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