There's a thing that happens to me with certain emails. I read them once, fast, the way you read everything. Then about an hour later I'm doing something completely unrelated — filling the kettle, say, or hoovering up the trail of biscuit crumbs Rattlin' leaves like a small grey Hansel — and the email comes back and gets me right under the ribs. This is one of those.
It's from a woman named Bríd. She's a nurse in a care home outside Cork city. She didn't tell me which one and I didn't ask, because the people she's writing about deserve their privacy more than I deserve a name to put on a website. Fair enough.
Bríd runs a singalong on Friday afternoons. Has done for years. Trolley of tea, a fella comes in with an accordion sometimes, sometimes it's just her with the words printed big on laminated sheets. And she wrote to tell me that of all the songs they do — and they do the lot, the whole canon, the parting glass and the sad ones and the bold ones — the one that does something the others don't is the bog.
Here's the part I keep coming back to.
She said some of her residents have dementia. Bad, in a few cases. The kind where a woman might not be sure what year it is, or might ask after a husband who's been gone twenty years, or might not place her own daughter when the daughter comes on a Sunday. Bríd was careful and plain about it, the way good nurses are. She wasn't trying to make it pretty. She just told me how it is.
And she said: those same people, who can't always tell you what they had for their dinner, will sing every verse of the Rattlin' Bog. In order. Right down to the flea.
I had to put the phone down on that one.
She said you can watch it happen. A woman who's been quiet all afternoon, somewhere far off behind her own eyes — and then someone starts "bog down in the valley-o" and something switches on. Bríd's word, not mine. Switches on. The woman's foot starts going. Then she's mouthing it. Then she's AHEAD of the room, calling the next verse before the rest of them get there, because she knows. The branch on the limb and the limb on the tree. She's got the whole ladder of it, perfectly, in a head that mislaid her own front door this morning.
I don't want to be soft about this, because I think being soft about it actually misses what's amazing. The temptation is to go "ah, the power of music, isn't it lovely" and dab your eye and move on. And it IS lovely. But that's not quite the thing. The thing is stranger and more interesting than lovely.
Because WHY this song. Why does the bog get through when so much else is locked behind a door nobody can find the handle for?
I've a guess. I'm not a doctor, I run a fan site, take it for what it's worth. But I think it's the SHAPE of it. The bog isn't really stored the way a fact is stored — a name, a date, where you put your glasses. It's stored the way a path home is stored. Each verse hands you the next one. The egg makes you think of the bird makes you think of the nest. You're not remembering ten separate things. You're remembering one thing that unfolds, and every piece pulls the following piece up out of the dark by the hand. The whole architecture of the lyrics is built so you can't lose your place, because the place is built into the song.
Which means a person doesn't have to hold the bog in the part of the brain that's failing. The song holds itself. It carries you. You just have to step on.
There's a fella I think about. Bríd mentioned a man — she called him just "one of the gentlemen" — who barely speaks now. Doesn't really come to the singalong, sits over by the window mostly. But she said the first Friday the accordion lad played the bog, this man, who hadn't said a full sentence to anyone in weeks, sang the flea verse. Sang it loud. Sang it RIGHT, the whole daft tumble of it, flea on the feather and the feather on the bird and so on all the way back down to the rare bog. And then he stopped and looked a bit surprised at himself, she said, and went quiet again, and that was that.
But for that one verse he was all there. Wherever "there" had been keeping him, the song went and got him and brought him to the window for a minute.
I think about that minute a lot.
People sometimes ask me — usually a bit teasing — why I've kept this site running for twenty-three years for ONE SONG. Why I've got a whole songbook and a forum full of lads arguing about verse order and a cat named after the thing. And I never have a good answer at parties. I just love it, I say, which is true but sounds daft said out loud.
Bríd gave me a better answer than I've ever managed. She didn't mean to. She was just telling me about her Fridays.
The reason is that a song like this gets in deep and it STAYS. Deeper than where you keep your worries, deeper than where the years pile up and start to slip. It goes in young, when you're four and your nana is bouncing you on her knee through the verses, and it sits down there and it WAITS, faithful as anything, for the rest of your whole life. And when nearly everything else has gone quiet, it's still down there, and it'll come up singing the second somebody starts it off.
That's not nothing. That's about the least nothing thing I can imagine.
To Bríd, and to every nurse and care assistant and accordion lad who shows up on a wet Friday with a trolley of tea and the laminated words: you're doing something that matters more than I think you know. You're not minding people. You're going to the window and bringing them back, one verse at a time.
Keep the Fridays going. The bog will hold up its end.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I read Bríd's email out to Rattlin', because I read most things out to Rattlin', he's a captive audience and a poor critic. He blinked at me very slowly, which from him is roughly a standing ovation. P.P.S. — If you've a parent or a nana in a home, bring the song in. Even hummed. Even just the "ho ro the rattlin' bog." You might be surprised who comes to the window.