Right. I have to write this one down before I lose the details, because it's the kind of thing that sounds made up when you tell it in the pub and I do NOT want this one to become a tall tale. It happened. I was there. I have a muddy boot to prove it.
So I was at a festival a few weeks back. I won't say which one (the lads from a couple of them read this blog and I don't want to start a row about whose portaloos are worse). It was the Sunday. It had rained the night before, the proper Irish rain that doesn't fall so much as it just APPEARS on you, and the whole field had turned into this brown soup that pulled the welly off your foot if you weren't careful.
And there was a queue for the toilets.
Lads. I have seen queues. I have queued for the chipper in Galway on a Saturday night. I queued for two hours once to get into a session that turned out to be cancelled. But I have never in my life seen a queue like this. It went back from the row of portaloos, along the fence, around the corner by the food trucks, and out of sight. Someone near me said it was the longest queue in Ireland and I genuinely don't think he was joking.
You know the mood of a queue like that. Everyone's quiet. Everyone's a bit grim. Heads down, phones out, that low-level human misery of standing in a wet field needing the jacks and knowing it's going to be twenty minutes minimum.
And then.
Somewhere up ahead of me — I never saw who, I want that on the record, I have NO idea who started it — a single voice went, "Ohhh ro, the rattlin' bog..."
Just like that. Out of nowhere. One fella, or one woman, I couldn't even tell, just sort of lobbed it into the air to fill the silence.
And the person beside them caught it. "...the bog down in the valley-o."
And then it spread.
I'm telling you, it went DOWN that queue like a flame down a fuse. By the time it reached me — and I was a good forty people back — the whole front half of the line was singing. So of course I joined in. (Did you think I wasn't going to join in? Me? At a festival? With THE song? I'd have crawled the length of that queue on my hands to join in.)
And here's the bit that gets me, the bit I keep telling people. It was IN HARMONY. Not on purpose. Nobody arranged it. But you get a few hundred Irish people who've all sung this thing at weddings and funerals and matches their whole lives, and the harmonies just... happen. There's always someone who drops to the low part. There's always a young one up the back who goes high. It builds itself.
We did the tree. We did the branch. We did the nest. By the time we hit the bird the whole queue was clapping, brown soup splashing up everyone's legs, nobody caring.
And then — you know what's coming — we hit the flea verse.
THE FLEA VERSE. In a toilet queue. The CLIMAX of the song, the bit where you have to rattle off the whole chain backwards at speed without taking a breath, and a few hundred desperate festival-goers attempted it AS ONE. It was chaos. Half of us were a verse behind. Some lad near me just gave up and shouted "AND THE BOG DOWN IN THE VALLEY-O" at the top of his lungs like a man being released from prison. People were roaring. A girl two ahead of me was crying laughing into her boyfriend's shoulder.
And the queue kept moving the whole time. That's the daft beautiful thing. We sang AND we shuffled forward. Progress was being made. The system worked.
When it ended there was a cheer, a proper one, and then this lovely awkward silence where a few hundred strangers all sort of looked at each other and grinned and didn't know what to say. Someone went "well, that passed the time." And everyone laughed again.
That's it. That's the whole story. There's no big lesson. I'm not going to dress it up.
But I've been thinking about it nonstop, because that is EXACTLY the thing about this song that I can never properly explain to people who don't get it. It's not about being good. Nobody in that queue was performing. There was no stage. There was no fella with a fiddle conducting it. It was just a few hundred miserable wet people who'd reached for the one thing they ALL knew, the one thing that would turn twenty minutes of standing in mud into the best part of the day. (It genuinely was the best part of my day. Better than any of the bands, and I paid good money for the bands.)
If you've never sung it, the chain's all there on the lyrics page, and there's plenty more where it came from over in the songbook. But honestly the lyrics aren't the point. The point is that you'll be standing somewhere damp and grim someday and someone will start it and you'll know what to do.
That's the magic of it. It's a song that waits for you in queues.
I never did find out who started it. Whoever you were — sound. Absolutely sound. You made a wet Sunday a thing I'll remember for the rest of my life.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I told Rattlin' the cat this story when I got home and she listened to the entire thing from the windowsill, which is more attention than she's given me in months. I think she respects a good queue. Or she was waiting for her dinner. One of the two.