Rattlin' knocked a notebook off the shelf yesterday. Just batted it with her paw while I was making tea. It fell open on the kitchen tiles.
It's an old one, from the 2002 era. I flipped through it and there's all the usual stuff — notes about the website, ideas for layouts, verse orders I was tracking back then, setlists from sessions at Cruise's and An Droichead.
But near the back, there are pages I don't recognize.
Not pages I've forgotten. Pages that I'm SURE I didn't write, except... I can see my handwriting. My handwriting, no doubt about it. The same pen. Same notebook. Same era, looks like.
But I have NO MEMORY of writing them.
They're verse orders. Different verses of the Bog. Verses that don't exist — or at least, verses I've never heard sung, and I've heard every version of the song that exists.
"On the root there was a stone, a rare stone, a rattlin' stone." "On the stone there was a mark, a rare mark, a rattlin' mark." "On the mark there was a word, a rare word, a rattlin' word."
And more, page after page. Verses that follow the same structure, the same rhythm. Written in my hand. But I didn't write them.
I've read the song maybe a thousand times. I know every verse anyone's ever sung it with. These aren't variants. These are verses that shouldn't exist.
Except they do. They're right here, in ink, in my notebook, in handwriting I can feel in my bones is mine.
I don't understand. I'm not going to lie — it's unsettling. But I'm putting this out there because maybe someone will recognize them. Maybe someone knows where these verses come from. Maybe there IS a version of the Bog I don't know about.
Or maybe I'm just losing the plot in my old age.
Slan go foill,
BogLord2002