I need everyone to sit down for this one.
Mick Hennessy joined the forum.
Mick. Hennessy. On the INTERNET. Of his own free will. I have been trying to make this happen for three years and I'd genuinely given up. There was a point, around last summer, where I told Rattlin' (the cat) that it would never happen, that some men are just not built for a forum, and that was grand, and I made my peace with it. And then on Sunday I get a notification that a new member registered.
Username: mick_fiddle_cruises.
I'll tell you the history here, because most of yous know Mick from when I quote his letters but you've never actually MET him, so to speak. Mick plays fiddle. He's nearly seventy. He's been coming to the session at Cruise's in Ennis since before I could legally be in the building, and he is, no exaggeration, one of the finest players I have ever stood beside. He has also been trying to write an eleventh verse for the Rattlin' Bog for over twenty years. Twenty years, lads. He carries it around in a notebook held together with an elastic band. He will not show it to anyone. He says it's "not ready." I have stopped asking.
Mick does not own a computer. Mick has a phone that his daughter forced on him and he uses it for two things: ringing me, and (he claims) checking the weather, though I have a strong suspicion he just looks out the window like a normal person and the phone is for show.
So you can understand my SHOCK.
What happened, as best I can reconstruct it, is that his granddaughter Saoirse was home for the weekend and Mick mentioned the shrine — he's heard me bang on about it for years — and Saoirse, who is sixteen and merciless, said "Granda just MAKE an account, it takes two seconds," and apparently sat there and made him do it. God bless that child. I'm putting her in my will.
Now. His first post.
I have to set the scene. We have lovely long welcome threads on here. People write paragraphs. zoe_tiktok_bog writes these gorgeous lowercase little poems when she introduces herself to a new member. CelticDreamer_Aoife will write you a whole essay about what the song means to her and have you weeping into your tea. That's the culture. That's the forum I built and I LOVE it.
Mick's first ever post, in the welcome thread Saoirse pointed him at, read, in full:
"Is this the one Seamus runs."
That's it. No question mark. No greeting. No sign-off. Four words. He saw a thread, he had a question, he asked the question, he left. Like a man who walked into a shop, didn't see what he wanted, and walked back out.
I have never been prouder of anything in my life.
The replies were INSTANT. Within the hour there were maybe fifteen people welcoming him. flea_verse_supremacy posted "NEW LORE JUST DROPPED" in all caps. bog_down_in_the_valley said "he posts like a noir detective and I'm obsessed." Somebody — I won't say who — has already started a running thread of "Mick translations," where they take his blunt little posts and write out the warm paragraph that's secretly hiding inside them. It's gas. It's one of the funniest things on the shrine right now and Mick has no idea it exists, which makes it funnier.
Because here's the thing yous need to understand. Mick is not cold. Mick is the warmest man in County Clare. He just doesn't WASTE words. He never has. When you've played fiddle in a pub for fifty years you learn that the music does the talking and your mouth should mostly stay shut and hold a pint. So when Mick replied to a young fella from Cork who asked, nervously, whether it was "too late to learn an instrument at thirty" — and Mick's entire reply was:
"No. Started at 8. Wasted years 1 to 8."
— that's not gruffness. That's a man handing you the kindest thing he knows how to say, with the wrapping paper removed. The whole thread went up in flames. session_newbie_cork said it was the best advice he'd gotten in years. I had to step away from the laptop for a minute, I'll be honest with you.
He hasn't mentioned the eleventh verse. I checked. I'm not going to ask him. If twenty-three years of friendship and a working internet connection haven't pried it loose, a forum won't either, and anyway I think the not-finishing is the whole point with Mick. Some songs you keep alive by singing them. That one he keeps alive by never being done.
So. If you see mick_fiddle_cruises post something short and devastating in a thread near you — be sound to him. He's learning the shape of the place. He typed that welcome post with one finger, I'd bet money on it, the pad of it, the way men of a certain age do, like the keyboard owes them something.
Mild dread, I'll admit, lingers. The man does not understand quote tags. He's going to reply to a forty-message thread with "Disagree" and no context and it's going to start a war and I'm going to have to moderate it. That day is coming. I can feel it in my water.
But for now? For now my oldest friend is on my forum, and somewhere out there a sixteen-year-old just did more for trad music than half the funding bodies in Ireland.
Go welcome him.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' sat on the keyboard while I was writing this and posted the letter "h" forty times in a draft reply. So technically the cat has a higher post-quality ratio than half of yous. Take that as you will.