Right. Sit down for this one. I've been turning it over for three weeks and I think I finally have it in an order that does it justice, which is harder than it sounds, because the whole thing happened inside about ninety seconds and I was singing through all of it.
So. The Tuesday session. Our usual. Back room, the fire that smokes if the wind's in the wrong corner, the same six of us plus whoever wanders in. Two of the whoever-wanders-in that night were a couple I'll call Liam and Saoirse, because that's not their names and they asked me to keep it a bit private and I respect that, even though every fibre of me wants to put up a plaque.
I'd seen them before. Maybe four or five times over the winter. Young enough — late twenties, I'd say. The kind of couple who don't make a show of themselves but you can tell. He'd watch her when she wasn't looking. You know the way. They'd come in, have the two pints, sing along to the bits everyone sings along to, and slip off before the last round. Lovely. Quiet. Sound.
What I did NOT know — what nobody in that room knew except him — was that Liam had been carrying a ring in his coat pocket for I'm told eleven days, waiting on the right moment and bottling it every single time. Eleven days. The man was a wreck, apparently, and we none of us noticed, which tells you how much attention musicians pay to anything that isn't the next chord.
Anyway. We started the bog.
Now you know how it goes. (If you don't, the lyrics are here and God help you.) It builds. Tree in the bog, branch on the tree, nest on the branch, and on up. Slow start, everyone settling in, and then the thing gathers itself like a wave deciding to be a wave.
We got to the egg.
And I'm mid-line — "and the egg in the nest, and the nest on the branch" — eyes half shut the way I do, leaning into it, and there's a sort of a STIR over by the window. A shuffle. The kind of movement that makes you open your eyes whether you want to or not. And I look over and Liam is down. On one knee. On our manky session-room floor that has had forty years of spilled Guinness soaked into it. Ring out. Box open. Looking up at Saoirse with a face on him like a man who has jumped off a cliff and is genuinely curious whether there's water.
And here's the thing I'll never get over. He didn't stop the song.
He could have. Anyone else would have. You'd raise a hand, you'd go "lads, hang on," you'd do the big silence, the spotlight, the whole performance of it. Liam didn't. He went down on the egg and he just — kept going. Mouthed it. "And the egg in the nest." Proposing in time. Proposing IN the song.
I have never in my life had to make a faster decision than what I made in that second. Because the whole room had seen it now, and there was that intake of breath, that wobble where a session could tip into a stunned silence and the moment goes all formal and awkward. And I thought, no. No no no. He's chosen this. He's doing it inside the bog. So we carry him.
I lifted my hand — the FACE I must have made at the lads, I'd love to have seen it — and I sort of conducted us all to keep going, soft, keep it under, don't you DARE stop, and we rolled into the nest verse barely above a whisper. "And the nest on the branch, and the branch on the tree."
And Saoirse said yes on the nest.
I didn't hear it. The room was too low and my own voice was in my ears. But I saw it. I saw her hand go up over her mouth and her head go down and then up and her saying it, the word, mouthing it back to him in time the exact way he'd asked her, the two of them now proposing and accepting INSIDE the same verse, the nest on the branch, the branch on the tree, the tree in the bog, the bog down in the valley-o.
And THEN we let it go.
The flea verse, when we hit it — because of course we still had the whole climb to the flea, you don't get engaged and skip the flea verse, have some respect — the flea verse came down like a roof falling in. Forty-odd years I've been in rooms with this song and I have never heard it sung the way that room sang it that night. Festival Fiddle Fiona was there and she told me after she had to stop bowing because she couldn't see the strings. Big Tom on the box was openly going, no shame, the tears running into his beard. I was gone myself. I'll not pretend otherwise. I sang the last "rattlin' bog" and the "o-ro" through a throat that had completely closed over and I do not know how the note came out but it came out.
When it landed — when it finally landed, the whole built-up tower of it, every verse stacked one on the other and then GONE in that last roar — the room didn't clap. Not at first. There was about two seconds where nobody did anything because nobody knew what to do with what had just happened. And then it all went up at once. Liam still on the floor. Saoirse with her hands on his face. Strangers hugging strangers. Somebody's mother who'd come in for one quiet drink absolutely in bits in the corner.
Best session of my life and I've had a few thousand of them.
Here's the part that got me writing this at last, though. About a fortnight later a card came to the shrine. Actual card, actual stamp, the address written out in a careful hand. Inside, the two of them. A thank you. They said they'd been trying to think of where to do it for months and nothing felt right — not a restaurant, not a beach, none of it. And then they were standing in our back room one Tuesday and Liam said he just KNEW, watching everyone climb the song together, that this was it. That a song you build a piece at a time, that nobody can sing on their own, that only works because the whole room agrees to hold it up — that was the only place to ask a person to spend their life with you.
I read that bit out to Rattlin. She was unmoved, as ever. But I wasn't.
They're getting married in the autumn. They've asked. I'm not going to say what they've asked, because I'll start again and I've only just dried out from the last go. But there'll be a song in it. You can be sure of that.
Some of you have written to me over the years asking is the bog a love song, and I always said no, sure it's a daft thing about a frog in a hole. I was wrong. It's the most love song there is. It just takes the whole room to sing it.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Liam, Saoirse: the card's pinned over the desk where I can see it. Rattlin tried to knock it down twice. She's not invited to the wedding.