Right. I need to tell you about Liam, and then I need to tell you about the envelope.
Liam is twenty-three. He busks on Bourke Street in Melbourne, which is roughly seventeen thousand kilometres from my kitchen, a number I had to look up twice because it seemed too big to be real. He plays guitar, he's got a decent voice on him by the sound of the clip he sent, and for the last while his most reliable earner — his words — has been the bog.
Not a quiet finger-picked version either. The full thing. He starts it small, just him and the guitar, "Ho, ro, the rattlin' bog," and by the third or fourth verse he's got the crowd doing the response, total strangers on a footpath in a city I've never seen, shouting "the bog down in the valley-o" at the top of their lungs of a Saturday afternoon. He sent me a video. There's a fella in a hi-vis vest who clearly stopped for ten seconds and is now, four verses deep, NOT LEAVING. That man has a tree, a branch, a nest and an egg to get through before he's allowed go home and he knows it.
Liam wrote to me because — and this is the part — he felt guilty.
He said, and I'm quoting because I saved the email, "I think I should be giving you some of this. It's your song. Your site taught me the verse order. I learned the whole thing off the lyrics page and now it pays my rent some weeks and that doesn't sit right with me, that I'm earning off you."
And then. THEN. There was an envelope on the way. He'd already posted it. Australian dollars, folded into a card, his actual hat money, the coins-and-notes a stranger drops in a guitar case — he was sending me a cut of it across an ocean because his conscience wouldn't let him keep all of it.
Lads.
I sat with that email for a good while. Rattlin' (the cat) was on the windowsill doing his impression of a loaf of bread and I just sat there reading it again. Because here's a young man, far from home, making a living the hard honest way, standing on a cold footpath singing his lungs out, and his instinct — his FIRST instinct — was that he owed somebody. That's a person raised right. That's a mother in some town somewhere who did the job properly. I'd put money on it.
But he's got the whole thing backwards, God love him, and I had to write back and set him straight.
You don't owe me anything, Liam. You don't owe ME and you certainly don't owe the bog. I didn't write it. Nobody alive wrote it. It's older than my granny and her granny and it was old when THEY got it. The whole genius of the thing — the reason it's lasted a few hundred years while cleverer songs came and went — is that it BELONGS TO WHOEVER'S SINGING IT. That's not a loophole. That's the entire point. You can't owe a debt on a thing the whole species owns. The bog is a commons. You walked onto it the same as the rest of us.
And anyway — me teach YOU? You're the one out there doing the actual work. I run a website from a kitchen in Ennis and bang on about the flea verse to anyone who'll hold still. You got a man in a hi-vis vest to sing harmony with a stranger. That's the harder job by a mile. You're not earning off me, son. You're keeping the thing ALIVE. There's a difference and it's the whole difference.
So I told him to send the money straight back where it came from. Specifically: I told him to take whatever he was going to post me and spend it on the lads. Whoever he busks near, whoever he splits a kebab with after a good Saturday, whoever's in his corner of Melbourne. Buy a round. Stand somebody a pint who's having a worse week than you. THAT'S the cut. That's the royalty. The song's currency was never euro or Australian dollars, it was warm rooms and full glasses and people who weren't talking ten minutes ago singing the same daft verse together, and the only honest way to pass it on is to keep the warmth moving.
He wrote back. He's going to do it. He said — and I love this — that there's an older Irish fella who busks the other end of the street, plays the box, bit of a legend by all accounts, and that's who's getting the first pint. From the bog, via Bourke Street, to a stranger with an accordion. That's the song doing exactly what it's for.
I get a fair bit of lovely post these days, ever since the whole TikTok carry-on. Tattoos, tea towels, a man in Osaka, a soldier, kids in classrooms. But there was something about a young lad's hat money, his actual coins, crossing the planet because he thought he'd taken something — that one's going to stay with me.
He didn't take anything. He gave it away. Seventeen thousand kilometres of footpath at a time.
Keep singing it, Liam. Loud. Badly if you have to. And tell your man with the box I said sláinte.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I told Rattlin' there was a cat-shaped envelope of Australian money nearly arriving and he was unmoved, but to be fair he's unmoved by most things that aren't ham. If you're singing the bog for your supper anywhere on this earth, you're welcome here, and you can find the rest of the songs we love if you ever need a second number for the hat. The bog'll always be the one that fills it, though.