I haven't known how to write this one. I started it three times. Last Saturday we buried Paddy Considine, and I've been carrying it around since, not sure what to do with it.
Paddy was eighty-one. He drank his half-pint slow at Cruise's for as long as I've been going, which is a long time now, and he was not a man you'd call a singer. He'd a voice like a gate that needed oiling. But he turned up. Every session. Sat in the corner under the photo of the hurling team, nursed the one drink, and when the bog came round he'd hammer his walking stick on the floor for the chorus and grin like a lad of nine.
You know the verse where everyone's voice goes a bit ragged trying to get all the words out in order? Paddy never bothered with the words. He just did the stick. Bang on the floor for "and the green grass grew all around, all around." Loudest man in the room and not singing a note.
He asked for the bog at his funeral. Wrote it down himself, apparently, on the back of a Mass card, and gave it to his daughter Eileen a good while ago. Not a hymn. Not Ave Maria, not Be Not Afraid, none of the ones you'd expect in a Clare church on a wet November morning. The Rattlin' Bog. All twelve verses. He was very specific. EILEEN, he'd written, MAKE THEM DO THE WHOLE THING.
So we did the whole thing.
I'll be honest with you, I didn't think I could. I was up the front because Eileen asked me to lead it, which I'm still not over her asking, and I had the lyrics printed even though I haven't needed them in twenty-odd years, because I genuinely thought my hands might shake too much to remember. There's a thing nobody tells you about singing at a funeral. The song you've sung a thousand times in the pub, drunk and happy, sounds like a completely different song in a cold church with a coffin in front of it.
We got through the bog grand. The tree, fine. The branch, the nest, the egg. Voices held. And then.
Then the bird. "And on that bird there was a feather." And somewhere around there the cumulative thing kicks in, the part where you have to reel the whole list back UP from the top, faster and faster, and that's the part Paddy loved, that's where his stick would come down, and there was no stick. Just a gap where the stick should be. And I heard about forty people all realise it at the same moment, that little hitch in the breath that goes round a room.
We cracked. All of us. I cracked first, I think, right on "the green grass grew all around." Couldn't get the words out. Festival Fiona was two rows back and she took it up when I went, and then it passed to TradSessionKing's old voice carrying it on, and back to me when I'd got my breath, and that's how we finished it. Hand to hand. Nobody managing the whole thing alone. Which, now that I write it down, is exactly how the song works anyway, isn't it. Nobody's meant to carry the bog on their own. That's the entire point of it. You sing the bit you can and someone catches the rest.
By the flea verse the whole church was going, the young ones who'd never been in a session in their lives, Paddy's grandkids, the priest (the priest!), all of us soaked and laughing and wrecked. And when it landed, when we hit "the bog down in the valley-O" for the last time, somebody up the back banged something on the floor. A walking stick, or a kneeler going over, I never found out which. And I'm not a soft man but that finished me entirely.
People keep saying it was beautiful. It was. But mostly it was Paddy. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that you cannot stay folded in on yourself when you're trying to remember whether the feather comes before the nest. He knew the song would not let us only be sad. It made us LAUGH at his own funeral, the cute old divil, and that was the gift, that was the whole thing he left us. Grief and the bog in the same breath and neither one cancelling the other out.
If you've ever wondered why I go on the way I do about a daft cumulative folk song, a children's song really, a song about a flea on a feather on a bird in a bog. This is why. It does a thing other songs can't. It holds a whole room together at the worst possible moment and refuses to let anyone drop. I wrote once about why I think it's the greatest song there is and I stand by every word, but I didn't have this in me yet when I wrote it.
If you want to know the verses Paddy wanted, in the order he wanted them, they're all here on the lyrics page. Learn them. Not for a funeral, God forbid, just learn them, so that some wet morning when somebody needs you to carry a line, you can.
Sláinte to you, Paddy Considine. The corner's not the same. We'll keep the stick going for you.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin sat on the printed lyrics the whole morning before the funeral and would not move off them, and I had to peel the page out from under him with himself glaring at me. I don't read anything into it. He's a cat and the page was warm. But Eileen said Paddy always liked cats, so there you are.