Shanagolden, Limerick County, Ireland

On our way to Buckland St Mary, Somerset, we got a message from the Office. There is a púca running amok in Ireland. It is unusual for a púca to act up like this, said the Office, and that it is plausible that the locals are mistaken and it is not a púca, but rather something else and if we’re lucky it could possibly be an ET-puck.

I tried to reason with the Office that ET-pucks are shy creatures and it is most unlikely for the púca sighting to have anything to do with an ET-puck, we would be wasting precious time going to Ireland and that we should rather investigate the lead we have in Buckland St Mary of the pixies that made nest in the computer of the Reverend at the parish. After all, electronics are a key attraction for ET-pucks. The Office, as is often the case, refuses to listen to reason and that’s why we find ourselves now in Ireland.

Miss Mary Tudor has been smelling mythical “energies” ever since we crossed the border and when we at last got to County Limerick she had to do some kind of smelling-ceremony. It’s to clear her olfactopsychic sense, she says. Ireland is so rich in mythical odours that she will go raving mad and start to scream like a banshee unless she can find olfactopathic harmony, she explained. It took her nearly an hour of sniffing various potions and breathing through one nostril then the other in complicated sequences. The short tempered Doctor Tom Holtz, Jr. exclaimed half way through Miss Mary Tudor’s procedure that he had enough of looking at her snivelling at those Voodoo flasks, none of which looked of a great enough quantity to be of any practical use, and why doesn’t she just put a washing pin on her nose instead; then he rushed off to a pub. I think part of his vehement reaction was to Cheshire Cat.

Truthfully, after forty-five minutes of watching Miss Mary Tudor picking out, sniffing at and putting back hundreds of little containers from a small wooden box, I had lost all of my initial curiosity at the strange olfactory rite. Even Cheshire Cat, who lay curled up under her chair, started to gnaw and eventually swallow one of its paws. Of course, the quantum physical being that it is, the swallowed paw merely appeared on the other side of the cat as a paw that was gnawing and swallowing a cat. It is this, I think, that disturbed Doctor Tom Holtz the most.

An old castle near Shanagolden.

When we eventually arrived at our destination, Shanagolden – a small village surrounded by hills, it was already late and left us no time to investigate the púca incidents. The innkeeper refused to talk about it.

In my books, today was a day lost, and we cannot afford to be losing days with D-Day coming.

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