Lads. I have to tell you about Saturday.
My cousin Aoibhinn got married. Lisdoonvarna, the Hydro, the big function room with the chandelier that's seen better decades. She married a fella called Dara from Roscommon, sound man, plays a bit of guitar, the kind of lad who shakes your hand and means it. Lovely day. The weather even held, which in Clare in July is basically a miracle and I will not be taking questions.
Now. I was NOT going to sing.
I want that on the record. I had it decided in the car on the way over. This was Aoibhinn's day, not mine, and the last thing anyone needs is your man from the family website hijacking a wedding with a bog. I'd told myself. I'd told Rattlin (the cat doesn't care but I told her anyway). Behave, Seamus. Eat your beef or salmon, clap at the speeches, dance the one obligatory dance, go home.
You can see where this is going.
The band were grand. A four-piece, fiddle and box and guitar and a young one on the bodhrán who was actually deadly, proper wrist on her. They did the first dance (it was something slow, I forget, I was three pints deep and emotional), they did the auld reliables, they had the room going. Around eleven they slowed it down and the singer asked was there anyone in the room had a song.
And here's the thing about a Clare wedding. There is ALWAYS someone has a song. It's a law.
My uncle Christy stood up and did half of Spancil Hill, which is what Christy does, he only knows half of Spancil Hill and has known half of it since 1987 and nobody has the heart to tell him. Then a cousin on the Roscommon side did a Galway thing. Then — and I swear I did not start this — my own mother, my MOTHER, points across the room at me and says, loud, in front of two hundred people, "Seamus has a song. Seamus does the bog."
The room went "OOOOOH."
What was I going to do. Disappoint a wedding?
So I went up. And I said to the band, look, I'll start it, ye'll catch on, it builds, just follow me and for the love of God don't stop. And the box player gave me a nod like he'd done this before, which he had, because every musician in this country has been ambushed by the rattlin' bog at least once.
I started low. The tree in the bog and the bog down in the valley-o. Just me. And by the second verse the fiddle had found me, and by the branch on the tree the whole top table was in, and by the time we hit the nest the bodhrán girl was DRIVING it, and somewhere around the egg the dancefloor filled.
I have done this song a thousand times. I have done it in our session, I've done it for tourists, I've done it down the phone to a man in Norway. I have never, ever done it like this.
By the feather on the bird there were forty people in a ring around the floor, going round, actually going round in a circle, holding hands, the little ones in the middle doing their own demented version. By the flea — and lads you KNOW the flea verse is the CLIMAX — the room was a wall of sound. The chandelier was rattling. I'm not being poetic. The chandelier was physically rattling.
And I looked over and Aoibhinn's father — my uncle Donie, a man I have seen cry exactly once, at his own father's funeral — Donie was standing at the top table with his arms folded and tears just rolling down his face. Not sobbing. Just leaking. Watching his daughter, in her dress, doing the bog with her brand-new husband, the pair of them roaring "and the flea on the wing!" and laughing.
I nearly went myself. I'll be honest. I had to look at the floor for a second.
We did it three full times through. Three. The band would NOT let it end, they kept pulling it back up just as it was about to land, the divils, and the room would scream and off we'd go again. Somewhere in the third round someone — I still don't know who, I'd love to shake his hand — built a tower of empty pint glasses on the edge of the stage. It got to be maybe eleven high. A monument. A wee glass cathedral. It survived two verses and then went over in the most glorious slow-motion smash you ever saw, right as we hit "rare bog," and the whole place ERUPTED like we'd won an All-Ireland.
Nobody got hurt. The glasses were empty. The Hydro have seen worse, trust me.
Afterwards Dara — the groom, the Roscommon man — came over to me with two pints, handed me one, and said, "I've been to a lot of weddings. I never heard a room do that." And then he said the thing that has me writing this at one in the morning instead of sleeping. He said, "You can feel everybody knowing the same thing at the same time. That's the whole point of a wedding, isn't it."
I didn't have an answer for that. I just clinked his glass.
That's the thing about this song that I can never properly explain to people who think it's just a daft kids' tune about a frog in a hole. It doesn't ask you to be good at anything. You don't need to be able to sing. You just need to be able to remember one more word than the last verse, and hold the hand of whoever's beside you, and by the end of it you've built something together out of nothing but breath and beer and the want to be in a room with each other. At a wedding that's not a party trick. That's the actual marriage, in miniature, forty times a minute.
Anyway. I said I wasn't going to sing.
I'm a liar. Aoibhinn, if you're reading this from the honeymoon — sorry, not sorry, and may ye be as happy as that room was. If you want to know how it all works, the whole site's here, but you were there, so you already know better than any of us.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I got home at half three and Rattlin was sat in the window like a disappointed landlord. I told her about the chandelier. She was unmoved. I gave her a bit of the salmon I'd wrapped in a napkin and we called it square.