There's a club in north London. I won't give the exact address because they didn't ask me to, but it's the kind of place you'd walk past and not clock — a function room over a pub, more or less, with a low ceiling and a carpet that's seen things. Irish club. The proper old sort. Fifty years it's been going this summer, and a woman called Bernadette emailed me, on behalf of the committee, to ask would I record a wee message for the anniversary night. And sing the bog into the phone while I was at it.
I said yes before I'd thought about it. Then I thought about it for nine days.
Here's the thing about a place like that. It was built by people who left. That's what a London-Irish club IS, when you scratch it — it's a room full of folk who got on the boat, mostly in the fifties and sixties, mostly because there was no work and no future and a mammy crying at the door, and they went to England to dig the roads and build the houses and nurse in the hospitals, and they were lonely in a way I will never fully understand. And they made themselves a room. Somewhere they could be Irish out loud on a Saturday without anyone looking sideways. Somewhere they could dance and sing the songs from home and not have to explain themselves.
My own uncle Padraig was over there for thirty years. Cricklewood. He came back to Clare to die, basically, the way a lot of them did or wanted to. He never said much about the early days. He'd go quiet if you asked.
So when Bernadette said the average age in the room would be "let's say senior," and that a good few of these people are the actual emigrant generation, the ones who left — I felt the weight of it. Who am I to send THEM a message? I'm a man who never left. I sat in Ennis my whole life with the bog on the doorstep, almost literally. I never had to make myself a room in a foreign city. I never had to keep Ireland alive in me on purpose, by force, in a function room over a pub, because keeping it alive was the only way not to lose it. They did that. For fifty years. I just made a website.
That's the nervous bit, if I'm honest. The "bog man" thing. I have this daft little corner of the internet and people are very kind about it, but standing in front of the actual diaspora and going "hello it's me, the fella from the song site" — I felt like a child showing his crayon drawing to people who'd painted the ceiling.
But I did it. I recorded it on the second-best phone in the house (the good one was charging) on a Tuesday night with Rattlin' yowling in the background, which I left in, because they'd understand a cat.
And I'll tell you what I said, more or less.
I said the bog song is a song about things growing on top of other things. A tree in a bog, a branch on the tree, a twig on the branch, a flea on the twig — on and on, each verse carrying everything that came before it, nothing dropped, nothing forgotten. And I said that's what they'd made, the fifty years of them. Each generation a verse on the one before. The ones who came in '74 standing on the ones who came in '64 standing on the boat-people of the fifties, and now their grandkids — London kids, English accents, the lot — coming up the stairs to the function room because that's where the family is on a Saturday. The song doesn't lose a verse. Neither did they.
Then I sang it. Badly. I went too fast on the flea (I always do, the flea is the CLIMAX and I get excited) and I had to do the last bit twice because the cat sat on the phone. I left that in too.
Bernadette emailed after the night. She said they played it between the meal and the dancing, on a speaker somebody's son had set up, and that an old man near the front — ninety if he was a day, she said, came over in 1958 — sang every word along with the recording without looking up from his pint. Every word. He'd carried that song across the Irish Sea sixty-six years ago and it was still in him, whole, intact, waiting.
I have not stopped thinking about that man.
He didn't need ME. That's the bit that finally settled the nerves. He had the song long before I had a website. The bog was never mine to give him — I just sent it back to a room where it had been living all along, in the throats of people who'd carried it further than I ever will. I'm not the bog man. I'm a man who minds the door of a room the bog already lives in. And there's a thousand other rooms. There's that one in Cricklewood, sort of, and there's a care home in Cork that does it every Friday, and there's wherever you are, reading this.
Fifty years, that club. May it get fifty more, though the maths of that is hard and I won't dwell.
To everyone who left, and made a room, and kept the songs alive in it so the rest of us could find them again — thank you. You're the reason any of this lasted. We were never minding it for you. You were minding it for us.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Bernadette says the old man's name is Mossie and he wants to know do I do requests. Mossie, I do nothing BUT requests. Tell me the song. P.P.S. — Rattlin' is on the recording forever now, immortalised yowling over the diaspora. He'd be delighted if he understood it, which he doesn't, which is probably for the best.