IF ONLY the creators of the newly opened Irish Leprechaun Museum had got in touch with me I could have filled their premises in a blink of an eye, a flash of a rainbow, whatever.
At the turn of the century I was contacted by the organising committee of the Nice Carnival. Held every spring it involves the famous (well in Nice, anyway) battle of the flowers and many lengthy parades of floats.
The theme for 2001 was to be the new euro and the committee decided to get in touch with a cartoonist in each of the euro-zone countries and ask them to design a float heralding their country’s entry into euroland.
“Really?” I said. “Not quite sure it’s my sort of thing”.
“Ah, go one,” they said. “Give it a go.”
They were able to say that as the lady representing the committee was born in Southend, in Essex, about 30 miles from the bit of Essex I was born in.
Our bit of Essex used to call her bit of Essex “Sarfend” mainly because we didn’t speak proper. But I digress.
So I got some paper and a pencil and I sat down and I thought, and I thought and I thought. And I decided that “designing floats for French carnivals” would never appear on my list of achievements. That’s what I thought.
So I talked to the lady from Sarfend and she said I should try again.
“Okay,” I said, “give me some help. What do the nice people of Nice think about when they think about Ireland?”
“Leprechauns,” she said. “Wha?” I said.
“Leprechauns,” she repeated, “and thatched cottages, and rain.”
“Is that it?” I asked. “What about the Celtic Tiger?”
“Wha?” she said (she spoke the same lingo as me).
“Okay then, no Celtic Tiger.” So I sat down, again, and thought again and, this time thought about euros and leprechauns.
I did a drawing. Just a sketch. Mademoiselle Sarfend had said fancy artwork wasn’t necessary as the float-makers interpreted the drawings taking into account materials and so on and so forth. My loose drawing clearly involved a very large banker taking a healthy amount of commission for exchanging a very small leprechaun’s crock of gold into euros. I didn’t like bankers even then. I think there was a thatched cottage in there somewhere. I took the rain for read.
I sent it off with a few extra sketches of Irish heads ’cos they asked for those too. As if Irish heads are any different from anyone else’s heads.
I then ticked off that as another job badly done and forgot about it.
Two months later the nice Nice lady from Sarfend was back in touch.
“Would we like to attend the carnivale and see the floats and generally have a good time, hotel room thrown in. Air tickets in the post. Sort of act like a politician for the weekend?”
“We can do that,” I said, packing my waterwings as I spoke.
So we went. And the first afternoon we sat in the stands and watched the dancing and the parade of flowers. Terrific. And then had dinner with some Norwegian friends who had flown down for the fun of it and to give me a chance to make lots of cutting remarks about Norway not being in Europe any more and not being in the euro and general childish stuff like that.
We were having a good time. Well I was. I can’t speak for the Norwegians.
Then at 8pm we took our seats in another stand and drank beer and waited for the big parade. And that was terrific too. But where was my giant banker and the poor little economically oppressed leprechaun?
“Here it comes now,” said Her Indoors, “You had better sit down.”
So I did as I always do what Her Indoors tell me.
And she was right, as usual. Because coming down the street in technicolour papier maché, a million watts of lighting and a small amount of gold foil was a wagging model of a 60ft high leprechaun remonstrating with a 4ft high banker.
And if I had seen it standing, with drink taken, I might have fainted clean away. I had designed it seems, THE BIGGEST LEPRECHAUN IN THE WORLD. It would have filled the whole of the new Museum of Leprechauns in the blink of an eye, a flash of a rainbow, whatever.