I've been meaning to do another one of these roundups for a while now, because the emails keep coming in and each one floors me more than the last. With permission from everyone involved, here are some highlights from the past few weeks.
From a pub in Sydney, Australia:
"We sing The Rattlin' Bog every Friday night at O'Malley's in Surry Hills. It started as a joke — one of the lads found your site on TikTok — and now it's tradition. Last Friday we had 40 people singing along. Some of them aren't even Irish. We have two Australians, a Brazilian, and a lad from South Korea who knows every verse. We printed out the lyrics from your site and laminated them. They're framed above the bar."
FRAMED. ABOVE THE BAR. I'm not crying, you're crying.
From a school in Berlin, Germany:
"I'm an English teacher at a secondary school in Berlin. I use The Rattlin' Bog to teach English vocabulary and cumulative sentence structures. The students love it. They fight over who gets to do the flea verse. One student made a poster of the entire verse structure and we put it in the hallway. Your website has been invaluable as a resource. Thank you."
The idea that German schoolchildren are learning English through a song about a flea on a feather on a wing on a bird in a bog is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.
From a nursing home in Cork:
"My mother is 91 and lives in a care home in Mallow. She has advanced dementia and most days she doesn't recognise me. Last week the activity coordinator played The Rattlin' Bog during music hour. My mother sang every word. Every single word. She couldn't tell you my name but she knew the flea verse. I sat in the car park afterwards and cried for twenty minutes."
I couldn't finish reading that one the first time. I had to come back to it.
From a university in Boston, USA:
"I'm a professor of Irish Studies at Boston College. We're using rattlinbog.fun as a case study in our 'Digital Diaspora' module. Your site is a perfect example of how cultural artefacts survive online, evolve through community engagement, and take on new meaning across generations. We'd love to interview you for our research paper if you're willing."
A CASE STUDY. In a UNIVERSITY. My little website that I built in my bedroom in Ennis with HTML I learned from a library book.
Every one of these emails reminds me why this matters. The song isn't mine. It never was. It belongs to the Friday night crowd in Sydney, the students in Berlin, the woman's mother in Cork, the researchers in Boston. It belongs to everyone who sings it.
Grand stuff altogether.
Slan go foill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)