So this happened to me on Wednesday and I'm still not over it.
I went down to the Spar for milk. That's the whole story, really, or it should have been. Milk, a sliced pan, and the paper because Mick had told me there was a thing in it about the by-pass and I wanted to see was he making it up (he was not, for once). Ordinary Wednesday. Drizzle. I'd my old jumper on, the green one with the hole in the elbow that Marie keeps threatening to bin.
There's a young lad works the till on the weekday mornings now. Glasses, very polite, the sort of fella who actually says "no bother" and means it. He's scanning the milk, and he sort of pauses. Looks at me. Looks again. And then he says, dead quiet, almost like he's afraid of being wrong —
"Sorry — are you BogLord?"
Lads. I nearly dropped the milk. I genuinely nearly dropped a two-litre of low-fat on the floor of the Spar in Ennis.
Because here's the thing. Nobody calls me that. Out HERE, in the world, I'm Seamus. I'm Marie's husband. I'm yer man with the cat. I'm the fella who plays a bit of bodhrán above in the back room on a Tuesday and gets ribbed for it. BogLord2002 is a thing that lives in here, in the website, in the forum, in the wires. It's not a thing that exists at a till between the bread and the lottery tickets.
And there it was. Out loud. In a young fella's mouth in my own town.
I said yeah. I said yeah, that's me, in a voice about an octave higher than my normal one, and I went a colour. I could feel it. The full Clare beetroot. Forty-odd years old and blushing at the Spar like I'd been caught at something.
He was made up, the poor lad. Turns out he'd found the TikTok thing, gone down the rabbit hole, ended up on the site, read about the cat, the lot. He said — and this is the bit that got me — he said his nan used to sing the Bog and he'd half forgotten it until the internet handed it back to him. And then he realised the website was being run by some auld lad from his OWN town. He said "I told my friend it was probably some American" and I said no, it's a man with a leaky jumper who lives ten minutes from here, and he laughed.
I forgot the paper. Walked out without it. Had to go back in for it, redder still.
Here's what I keep turning over in my head, though. For YEARS this site was a quiet little room. Just me, and a handful of you, and the song. I'd come in here the way you'd go up the attic — to potter, to fix a counter, to be alone with a thing I loved. I never once thought of it as something that touched the actual street. And now the two worlds have gone and collided over a carton of milk, and I don't quite know what to do with that.
Part of me is mortified. I'll be honest. There's an Ennis voice in the back of my skull going "would ya stop, BogLord, the state of ya." We're a county that's allergic to notions. You don't go around being recognised. That's for the telly people.
But a bigger part of me — and this is the part I'll admit to — was DELIGHTED. Quietly, hugely delighted. Because that young lad didn't recognise me for being clever or for being on the radio. He recognised me because of the song. Because a thing I made for the love of it reached across whatever distance the internet is, and came all the way back round, and landed at a till in my own town in the mouth of a young fella whose nan used to sing it. That's not fame. That's something gentler and stranger and far better than fame. That's the song doing what the song does. It travels, and it comes home.
I told Marie. She said "well don't let it go to your head," which is the most loving thing she knows how to say. Then she made me put the green jumper in the wash.
I keep thinking I should be cooler about all this. Twenty-odd years I've been at this and you'd think the surprise would wear off. It does not. Every single time someone tells me the Bog found them, I'm thirty-eight again and grinning at a screen at one in the morning. I don't think I'd want it to wear off, if I'm honest.
Anyway. If you're the young lad from the Spar and you ever read this — come above to the session some Tuesday. You'll get a worse rate of conversation than the till but better music. And the verse you want is the flea. Trust me. The flea is the CLIMAX.
Right. I'm away. I've to go back for the milk I forgot AGAIN, because I left the new one on the wall and the rain got at it.
Slán go fóill,
BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I told Rattlin' I'd been recognised in public and she gave me a look of such profound indifference that I felt humbled all over again. She has never once been impressed by me. It's good for a man, that.