I want to tell you about a pub I'm not going to name. Not because I'm being coy. Because the man who runs it is mortified enough already and I've decided to be the bigger man about it, which is a thing I am NOT historically good at, so savour this.
We'll call him Brendan. Because that's his name. (I said I'd be the bigger man. I never said I'd be sensible.)
So Brendan's place does a Thursday session. Has done for years. Lovely room, low ceiling, a fire that draws funny so half the time you're singing through a faint mist of turf smoke, which honestly only adds to the atmosphere unless you have a chest. And for a good long while the session would, like all good sessions, eventually arrive at the bog. You can't stop it arriving. It's like the tide. Somebody's nan starts it under her breath during a lull and within ninety seconds the whole room's gone and there's no getting it back in the box.
Now. Brendan, God love him, runs a TIGHT ship. Last orders means last orders. And somewhere around the back end of last autumn he got it into his head that the bog was — and I am quoting him directly here, I wrote it on a beermat — "an absolute black hole for a Thursday."
His theory, which he delivered to me with the gravity of a man explaining tax law, was this. A normal song, your three-minute number, lad finishes it, people clap, somebody goes to the bar, MONEY CHANGES HANDS. But the bog? The bog goes on. And on. And the cumulative thing means nobody can leave to get a pint because they'd lose their place in the verse, and so for the eleven, twelve, sometimes FOURTEEN minutes that yer collective bog takes to build itself up and collapse, not one single person approaches the bar. They're all too busy bellowing about the flea on the feather on the bird. The till goes quiet. Brendan stands there with his arms folded watching forty people have the time of their lives and not spend a penny.
So he banned it.
He actually banned it. Put a wee laminated sign behind the bar — laminated, the man committed — that said "No Cumulative Songs After 9." I want you to sit with the phrase "no cumulative songs." Like we were a public order problem. Like the Twelve Days of Christmas is going to start a riot.
I'll be honest with you, lads, I was OUTRAGED at the time and I'm a little embarrassed about how outraged. I rang Margaret from the carpark. She told me to calm down and that it was a private business and the man could ban what he liked, which was correct and deeply unwelcome.
Here's where it gets gas.
The session didn't die. The session went DOWN THE ROAD. There's another place, ten minutes' walk, run by a woman called Carmel who took one look at the situation, said "well I'm not banning a song," and put a fire in the back room. And the Thursday crowd — your fiddlers, your bodhrán lad, the nan, the lot of them — just... migrated. Quietly. Nobody made a fuss. They just stopped turning up at Brendan's and started turning up at Carmel's, where the bog could go on for as long as the bog wanted to go on, and where, crucially, people DID go to the bar afterwards. Because here's the bit Brendan's tax-law brain missed.
People don't drink DURING the bog. They drink AFTER the bog. They drink because of the bog. You sing for fourteen minutes, you've a throat like the inside of a kiln and a feeling in your chest like you've been hugged by the whole room, and the very first thing you do — the VERY first thing — is buy a pint and buy one for the stranger beside you who knew verse eleven. The bog isn't a black hole. It's the thing that makes the rest of the night worth being there for. You don't put a price on the lull. The lull pays for itself an hour later.
Carmel's takings on a Thursday went, by her own telling, "stupid." Brendan's went the other way.
It took him about three weeks to do the maths, and I'll give him this, he did it without being asked twice. I got a text. Brendan's not a texter — this is a man who once left me a voicemail that was four minutes of him looking for his glasses — so a text from him is an event. It said, and I have this one screenshotted: "tell them the sign's gone. tell them I said the bog's grand. tell them I never said it was BAD I said it was LONG there's a difference."
There is no difference, Brendan. But I forgive you.
The laminated sign, by the way, is gone but not destroyed. Carmel asked for it. She has it framed in HER back room now, behind the bar, like a hunting trophy, and underneath it she's written "banned here: nothing." I think that's the funniest thing that happened in County Clare last year and I include a great deal in that assessment.
We went back to Brendan's the first Thursday after. Full house. He stood a round, which for Brendan is roughly equivalent to another man gifting you a car. And about half ten the nan started it under her breath during a lull, the way she does, and the tide came in, and Brendan stood at the end of the bar with his arms folded — but this time he was mouthing the responses. Caught him red-handed. The man who banned the bog, doing the bird-in-the-egg under his breath like the rest of us.
I'm gracious in victory. I am. I bought him a pint and I only said "long, is it?" the once.
(It was twice.)
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin spent the whole saga asleep on the radiator, supremely uninterested in the economics of folk music, which I think is the correct response and I aspire to it. When I told Margaret the sign was framed in Carmel's he opened one eye, judged me, and went back to sleep. He bans nothing. He simply withholds approval. We could all learn from him.