I'll be honest with you. Most of my emails are about the flea verse.
People want to argue the order. People want to tell me I've spelled "rattlin'" wrong (I haven't, the apostrophe is load-bearing). People want to know if Rattlin' the cat is real (he is, he's currently sitting on the radiator like a loaf of bread). It's grand. I love all of it.
But last Tuesday I got one that I read sitting down, and then I read it again standing up, and then I made tea and didn't drink the tea.
It was from a fella named Cormac. He's a private in the Defence Forces — the Irish Army — and at the time he wrote to me he was posted to Lebanon. UNIFIL, the peacekeeping mission down on the southern border. Irish lads have been doing tours there since the seventies. His granddad did one. Now it was his turn.
He didn't write to argue about the flea verse. He wrote to tell me something I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.
He said that on the bad nights — and he was careful, he didn't say WHICH nights or what made them bad, soldiers are like that, they leave the worst part as a shape in the air — on the bad nights, when the lads were keyed up and a long way from anywhere, somebody would start singing the bog.
"It's never planned. Someone just starts. Bog down in the valley-o. And by the second 'ho ro' the whole post is in. You've fellas from Donegal and fellas from Cork and one lad from Clare, and for the length of that song nobody's anywhere except home. Then the song ends and we're back. But we needed the minute."
One lad from Clare. I'll tell you, I sat with that. There's always one lad from Clare.
Here's the thing that got me. I always thought of the bog as a session song. A pub song. A thing you do with a pint in your hand and a fiddle in the corner and a fire going. Warm. Safe. The opposite of frightened.
And Cormac's telling me that the exact same song, with the exact same daft escalating list — the limb and the branch and the twig, the whole architecture of it — does its job just as well thirty-five hundred kilometres from Ennis, in the dark, with men who are scared and won't say so.
Same song. Completely different job.
I think I understand it now in a way I didn't before. The bog isn't really ABOUT a bog. I mean it is. There is a bog and there is a tree on it and so on. But the reason it works is that it's a machine for putting a lot of people in the same place at the same time. It doesn't ask you to feel anything. It doesn't have a sad verse. There's no dead lover, no famine ship, none of the heavy stuff our songs love so much. It just builds. Bog, tree, limb, branch, twig, nest, egg, bird, feather, FLEA. You hold the whole list in your head, one piece at a time, and you do it TOGETHER, and you cannot do it alone because nobody remembers the order alone — you need the lad beside you to come in on "and the green grass grew all around."
You need each other to sing it. That's the whole trick. That's the entire thing.
A scared man on a sandbag in Lebanon needs the lad beside him. The song just gives him a reason that doesn't require either of them to say a word about being scared.
Cormac asked me — almost shy about it, the way you'd ask for something small — whether I had a "proper" version of the words his unit could print and stick up in the cookhouse. He said they'd been singing a slightly mangled version for years and he wanted to settle a few arguments. (See? It's ALWAYS the order. Even in a war zone it's the order.)
I sent him the full lyrics within the hour. I also told him that whatever version they'd been singing for years was the correct one, actually, because the version that gets you through the night is the version that's right. The book can wait.
He's home now, by the way. I waited to write this until he was back on Irish soil, because it didn't feel right to publish a thing about a man while he was still out there. He told me the first thing he did off the plane was get a Tayto sandwich and a 99. The second thing, he says, was sing the bog in the airport with two of the lads he served with, properly, loudly, until a security fella came over. He says the security fella knew all the words.
Of course he did.
I built this site in 2002 in my mam's box room because I loved a song. I genuinely thought I knew what the song was for. A man in a flak jacket had to explain it to me twenty-three years later.
It's a portable piece of Ireland. You can fold it up small and carry it anywhere, and when you take it out and shake it loose, the whole green country comes spilling out — the valley, the bog, the rare bog, the rattlin' bog — and for one minute you're home no matter where your boots are standing.
To Cormac, and to every lad who's ever sung it somewhere it had no business being sung: thank you. Mind yourselves. The session's still here when you get back.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' the cat is, as established, no help to anyone in a crisis. But Cormac mentioned the post had a stray site cat that adopted the cookhouse, a skinny grey yoke they called Sergeant. I like to think every gathering of homesick people grows its own cat eventually. It's the law, I think. It must be.