Talking of Oscars - and who isn't these days? - one fondly remembered film that never quite made it to the Academy's rostrum was The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This 1956 science fiction tour de force has Dr Miles Bennell, who has obviously had some very nasty experiences of an extraterrestrial kind, misdiagnosed by his laidback medical team as being merely "mad as a March hare". Serious students of the cinema will be curious about the origins of this leporine allusion.
Curiouser and curiouser, indeed! For it is to Alice in Wonderland, of course, that we look for the popularisation of this psychiatric concept. Alice, you may recall, before joining the Mad Hatter and his companions at that famous tea party, surmised that "the March Hare will be much more interesting, and perhaps as this is May, it won't be raving mad - at least not so mad as it was in March".
All of which prompts, in turn, the question raised in Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy: "Wherefore a hare suld be mad at March mair than at Martinmas, is mair than I can weel say."
Hares are inhabitants of the open countryside. They have, as it happens, some skill in weather forecasting, in that it is said that during the winter months, if they forsake the hills and scarper down the valleys, then snow is surely on the way. They are mainly solitary creatures except during their breeding season, which occurs around this time of year.
As with humans, the amorous enthusiasm of competing males results in strange antics, including bounding to and fro, wild kicking, and the protagonists standing on hind legs appearing to box with one another. This unrestrained exuberance during the rutting season has led to the expression "mad as a March hare".
There is another story, too, recorded some years ago by Doreen Scally in a little booklet called An Taisce Fingal, which explains one of the hare's bestknown features. At the dawn of time, it seems, the Moon looked down and noticed that everybody was very much afraid of dying. As the hare was known for his fleetness of foot, the Moon decided he would make a good messenger of hope: "Tell them," said the Moon "that everyone, like me, in dying will be renewed again."
But the rushing hare mixed up the message, and told the world: "Unlike the Moon, who is renewed in dying, you will not be born again." And the Moon was so angry that it bit the hare on the lip, where the mark can be seen to this very day. Or so they say!