Where’s my pot of gold?

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on 8th March  2024.

We’ve been back at Le Shack for just over two weeks and the weather has been changeable. It seems that April showers have arrived in March and so my question for this month has a connection to all this wet weather.

My Dad always told my brother and I that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when we were kids and for years we believed him. If my memories are to be trusted it mostly happened whilst we were out driving in the car and we would squeal in delight as he followed the rainbow trail to a nearby hill or a copse of trees. Of course the rainbow is a trickster, an ephemeral haze of colour that played games with us, always just out of reach, always moving on, and we never found our pot of gold. That disappointment never dulled our enthusiasm, the naïve childish belief in a pleasing tale standing strong against reality.

On rainy days at Le Shack I often see a rainbow as I look out of the kitchen window and across the valley. The other day it clearly ended in a copse of trees just below the cabin and a small, childish part of me was tempted to forget about making soup and charge out across the field in search of a cauldron filled with gold nuggets. Unfortunately my adult mind stepped in and quashed such a ridiculous notion before I could get out of the door.

The rainbows are real, a spectacle of nature, a ribbon of many hues formed when sunlight is scattered from raindrops, but the pot of gold is a myth. According to Irish folklore, leprechauns would often bury their gold at the end of a rainbow. If you were lucky enough to catch one of these grumpy, bearded faerie-goblins they might grant you three wishes in exchange for their release but persuading them to share their gold was no easy task. They hoarded it fiercely, and had a reputation for being treacherous. Great care had to be taken in choosing your three wishes or you might get something you hadn’t bargained for.

In 1989 an Irish publican called P J O’Hare claimed that he had found the remains of a leprechaun in Carlingford, County Louth. The skeleton crumbled to dust but he kept the clothes and displayed them in his pub. A group of people who believed in leprechauns claim that only 236 of them remain in Ireland and all of them live in Carlingford. As a result of their lobbying efforts, leprechauns have been protected by a European directive since 2009. Finding this hard to believe I plunged into the official website for The Habitats Directive, which protects wild animals, plants and habitats in Europe and, whilst I learnt that there are protective plans in place for the Common Midwife Toad and the Danube Clouded Yellow Butterfly, I could find no reference to the elusive leprechaun. Given the extensive nature of the website they could have been hidden away in any number of lists and locations and so I will give the leprechaun fans the benefit of the doubt.

Each year these enthusiasts gather for a leprechaun hunt in Carlingford, as do other groups dotted about through Europe and America. Strangely enough, no live leprechauns have ever been found, but the strategic placement of a doll-like version of the real thing along the trail ensures that the hunt is always a success.

It would be all too easy to dismiss these enthusiasts as being as mad as a box of frogs, but on the other hand I find our willingness to believe in things other than ourselves, no matter how whimsical or ridiculous, to be something to celebrate. Instead of viewing it with a cynical eye, we could decide that the ability to indulge in flights of fancy is one of the better characteristics of the human race and certainly a welcome relief from the prejudice and bitterness that threatens to engulf us all at the moment.

As I peeled and chopped my carrots and parsnips, and the rainbow across the valley faded gently away, I imagined a leprechaun, clothed in emerald green, a jaunty hat perched atop his head, crouched over his gold in the undergrowth in that copse of trees down the hill. Perhaps he was looking up at me, a knowing glint in his eye, secure in the knowledge that as long as I didn’t really believe in him, both he and his gold were safe.

And that sums it up for this week. Despite the showers, spring is definitely in the air, and that can only be good news.

Until the next blog….à bientôt.

MaryJane