I'm going to tell you about my Thursday.
It was a normal Thursday. Rattlin' (the cat) had knocked a mug off the counter at half six in the morning, which is his alarm clock for me, apparently. I had toast. I answered three emails about whether the bog is a real bog (it is a metaphor AND a real ecosystem, lads, both can be true). Normal.
Then I opened the next one and the subject line just said "from Osaka, with thanks." And I thought, grand, another lovely note, I get a few of those a week now since the TikTok thing, and they genuinely make my whole week, every one. So I opened it expecting a kind word.
It was a photo. Of a man's forearm. With my song on it.
His name is Kenji. He's 38, he works in — I think he said logistics, something to do with a port — and he lives in Osaka, which if you've never looked it up is roughly nine thousand kilometres from my kitchen table in Ennis. And on the inside of his left forearm he has, in beautiful clean lettering, the flea verse. The FLEA VERSE. The one I have been banging on about for twenty years to anyone who'll sit still.
"And on the flea there was a... bog." Wait no. You know the one. The flea is the CLIMAX of the whole edifice (I will not be taking questions on this). And he's got it on his arm forever.
But here's the part that did me in. It's in two languages. The English running down one way — the actual verse — and then beside it, smaller, the same words in Japanese. He had it translated himself. He told me he sat with a friend who does calligraphy and they worked out how to keep the rhythm of the thing, the build, the way each line is heavier than the last because it's carrying everything that came before it. That's the whole genius of the song and a man in Japan understood it well enough to put it on his SKIN in a language I can't even read.
I had to get up and walk around the kitchen.
He found it the way half the world finds things now, on his phone, late at night, a clip somebody posted. He said he didn't understand the words at first but he understood the SHAPE of it. The way it climbs. He said — and I'm going to quote him because I asked could I — "It felt like the song was building a house and inviting me to live in each room as it appeared." Nine thousand kilometres. A man who'd never been to Ireland, never been near a bog, never sat in a session in Quinn's with a pint going warm. And he heard the climb.
I keep thinking about how this song got to him. It wasn't on the radio in Osaka. Nobody handed him a Clancy Brothers record. It just... went. Out into the world, the way these old songs do, hand to hand to phone to phone, and it found a man in a port city who needed exactly that shape of thing and he loved it enough to make it permanent.
I wrote back something completely useless. I think I said "I am honestly crying at my desk" three separate times, which is not eloquent but it was true. (It was true.) Rattlin' came and sat on the keyboard while I was typing, the way he does when I get emotional, which is a thing he genuinely does and don't tell me cats can't tell, I know what I know.
Kenji asked, very politely, if it was alright that he'd done it. As if he needed MY permission. As if I own the bog. I don't own the bog. Nobody owns the bog. The whole point of the song is that it belongs to everyone who sings it, that's why it's lasted, that's why your granny knew it and your granny's granny — it's a thing you join, not a thing you buy. I told him the only thing he owed anyone was to sing it loud at least once a year, ideally in a pub, ideally badly.
I've had a few mad bits of post over the years. The letter from New Zealand still gets me. But this is the first time someone's put it on their actual body and I don't think I've fully landed back down from it yet.
A Clare folk song. On a man's arm in Osaka. In two languages.
I started this site in 2002 because I loved a daft cumulative song and I wanted somewhere to put that love. I did not imagine THIS. I could not have imagined this. Some mornings I think the whole thing — the website, the forum, the lovely strange people who've washed up here — I think it's all just an excuse for moments like Thursday. Where the world feels suddenly very small and very warm and a stranger on the far side of it turns out to love the same daft beautiful thing you do.
If you've got the song somewhere on you — a tattoo, a tea towel, a tattoo of a tea towel, I don't know — send me a photo. I mean it. You can find more of the songs we love here, but the bog is the one that started it.
Thank you, Kenji. The flea verse salutes you.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I asked Kenji did it hurt and he said "only the small lines." I think about that a lot. Only the small lines hurt. There's a whole philosophy in there somewhere but it's late and Rattlin' wants fed.