I awoke, stretched and yawned. The sun was bright upon my face, and the sky outside of my bedroom window was a beautiful blue. It felt like the start of a wonderful day. It might even be the luckiest day of my life. I washed, and shaved, put the kettle on, then opened the back door. My reveries came to an abrupt stop. There, in the centre of the lawn, was the most extraordinary little fellow. He was for all the world as I would imagine a leprechaun to be,except that he was bright red from head to foot.
    He smiled at me benevolently, and brushed majestically past me into the house as though he owned the place. He looked around my sparsely furnished, but functional sitting room, and uttered an expansive sigh.

   “Magnifique”, he said. “Just what I ‘ave been looking for.”

   “Pardon me,” I said. “ I thought leprechauns were Irish. You sound undeniably French,” and as an afterthought. “And why are you not green?”

   “Mais Non !”, he said, indignantly. “I am a European. My family came to Europe nearly five hundred years ago. We fled from ze 'orrible Oliver Cromwell and became the first leprechaun European Emigrants. Ees for short. Only ze Irish leprechaun is green. Red is our colour. Now, sadly I am ze last. No more Ees will you find after me .”

    He continued in this vein all day, and for several days after that. At the same time, he made himself very useful about the house, keeping the place tidy and providing the occasional French cuisine. On the seventh day, he became strangely quiet, and began looking at me reproachfully. Then, suddenly, he was gone.
   I confided in a close and learned friend. He looked at me in amazement. “You had an EE for a house guest? Do you know what that means?”
   I had to confess that I didn’t
   “The EE is the rarest leprechaun in the world,” explained my advisor. “He will stay with you for one week. If you cross his palm with silver, you will be lucky for the rest of your life. But,if you don’t give him a small present, he will leave, and bad fortune will follow you for ever.”

   I hurried home. The house was depressingly empty. As I tripped over the front door mat I saw, in the distance, a rainbow moving at some speed down the M62. I jumped in my car and gave chase. We raced down through Birmingham, to London, and on to the cross channel ferry.

   By the time I got to Paris, the rainbow was speeding across France.I continued my pursuit into Germany. I eventually caught up with it in Hamburg. It could go no further. It was stranded on the quayside. The German dockers were on strike.
   EE greeted me with a wan smile. “I thought I wasn’t welcome, so I left,” he said. I explained that my actions were due to ignorance rather than lack of consideration, and pressed a shiny new fifty pence piece into his hand.

   “Did you come twelve hundred miles to give me this?” he asked incredulously.

   I nodded my assent, wanting to get back in his good books.

   “Of course I did. What’s twelve hundred miles between friends?”

   “Oh Tom,” he sighed. “That’s a long way to tip a rare EE”

Copyright © 2004 Thomas Vaughan
(OK. So I’m sorry! All Right?)