Right. So this is not a post I planned to write.
I run a fan site about a cumulative folk song. That's the job. That's the whole remit. People come here for the lyrics, they argue about whether the flea verse is the CLIMAX (it is), they tell me their granny sang the eighth verse in a different order, and I love every bit of it. That's what the shrine is FOR.
And yet. My inbox.
It started, near as I can tell, when I mentioned Rattlin' was getting on a bit and acting peculiar. I wasn't fishing for anything. I was just rambling, like I do. But something about it set you all off, and now I am getting cat photos. Daily. From everywhere. Subject lines like "for Rattlin', in solidarity" and "my cat heard about your cat." One fella in Galway just sent a photo with no words at all. Just a ginger tom asleep in a fiddle case. That was the entire email. I have looked at it eleven times.
So. Against my better judgement. Here is a roundup.
We'll start with the one that broke me. A woman called Bríd sent in a photo of her cat, a big grey lad named Aengus, sitting bolt upright on top of a guitar she'd left flat on the bed. She said he does it every time someone in the house starts a song, "like a furry little conductor." She included a second photo where he had clearly fallen asleep mid-conduct and toppled over sideways onto the strings. I have decided Aengus is an HONORARY SHRINE CAT. There was no application process. I just decided.
Then there's the ones from abroad, which honestly do my head in (in the good way). A reader in São Paulo — I think the same crowd around rattlin_bog_brasil — sent a tabby kitten she's named Bog. Just Bog. A kitten called Bog living in Brazil because of an Irish song about a tree. Lads. I'm not over it. I'm not going to GET over it. She wrote "he is small but he is rattlin'" and I read that out to my brother on the phone and he didn't get it and that's fine, that's HIS loss.
A man in Manchester sent his two, a pair of black cats he swears are named after verses. The flea and the feather, he said. The flea one bites. Obviously. There's a poetry to that I won't insult by explaining.
Now I'll be honest with you. Not all of them are funny. Some of them got me right in the chest.
A woman wrote in — I won't use her name, she didn't ask to be in a post — to say her old cat had died the week before, fifteen years she'd had him, and she'd come to the shrine to read about Rattlin' because it was the only place online that talked about an aging cat the way she felt about hers. Not as a pet. As a witness. As the thing that was THERE through all the years. She sent a photo of him on a windowsill in the sun and I just sat with that one a while. Didn't reply straight away. Couldn't.
That's the thing nobody tells you about a fan site. You think you're running a place about a song. You're actually running a place about everything the song reminds people of. The kitchen. The granny. The cat on the keyboard. The song was never really the point. The song is just the excuse we all use to talk to each other.
Anyway. Lighter notes. We've a cat in Cork named Verse Eight. A cat in Donegal who, I am reliably informed, "only tolerates trad." A Norwegian reader — sound man, knows his folklore — sent a photo of his cat sitting beside a printout of the lyrics with a look of profound disappointment, and titled it "she has notes." A young one sent a TikTok of her cat's ear twitching in perfect time to the song and I will be honest, the timing was UNCANNY. (Don't @ me. I know cats don't have rhythm. This one did.)
And Rattlin' herself? She's grand. Slower, sleeping more, still knocking the good mug off the desk to watch it fall, still planting herself on the keyboard the second I try to get work done. She has no idea she's become the patron saint of a small international cat-photo movement. She'd be horrified. Or she'd be smug. Hard to tell with her. Always has been.
So here's where I land. I have lost control of my own website's theme. It is, against all my plans, now ALSO a cat website. And do you know what? I'm not going to fight it. A place where strangers send you photos of their cats because your cat got old — that's not a site going off the rails. That's a site that's working exactly right.
Keep them coming. Honorary shrine cat status is being handed out with reckless abandon. There is no register. There is no limit.
If you need the actual song afterwards, it's still right where it always was, over in the songbook. I'd hate for you to think I'd forgotten what we're meant to be doing here.
Slán go fóill,
BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' is asleep on the radiator as I write this, one paw over her face, deeply unbothered by her fame. I showed her the photo of Aengus the conductor cat. She blinked once and went back to sleep. I'm choosing to read that as approval.