I nearly didn't go.
I want that on the record, because I think it matters. Friday gone, last week of November, dark by half four, the kind of cold that gets into the small of your back and stays there. I'd been at it all day. Up early, a long stretch of fairly tedious work that I won't bore you with, and by six o'clock I was on the sofa with the heating on and a cup of tea going cold beside me and Rattlin' the cat asleep on my lap like a furry paperweight, and the very LAST thing in the world I wanted to do was put boots on and walk out into that.
You know the feeling. You're tired in that bone way. And the session's at half nine, and half nine feels like a country you'd have to emigrate to.
So I sat there and I did the sums a man does. It's only a session. There'll be another one. I've been to hundreds — over a hundred properly now, I wrote about that not long ago, the hundred sessions thing — so what's one missed? Nobody'd notice. Nobody'd mind. I could have the early night I'd been promising myself since roughly 2019.
And I'd half-decided. I'd actually half-decided to stay.
Then Mick texted. Just three words. "You coming or." No question mark, because Mick doesn't believe in punctuation that isn't strictly necessary, the savage. And I looked at the cat, and I looked at the cold tea, and I thought, ah, go on. Go on out of that.
I'm so glad I did. That's the whole post, really. But let me tell you WHY, because the why is the interesting bit.
It wasn't a special night. I need you to understand that. There was no famous fiddler passing through, no documentary crew, none of the carry-on that's followed this site about the last while. It was just the regulars and a couple of faces I half-knew and a fella down from Galway visiting his sister. Eight, nine of us. Quiet pub. The fire going.
And it was one of the best nights of the year.
I can't fully explain it and I've given up trying. You can't book the craic. That's the thing nobody tells you when you're young and you think the good nights are the BIG nights — the festivals, the headliners, the ones you plan for weeks. They're grand. But the great nights, the ones that stay with you, they ambush you. They turn up on a wet Friday when you'd rather be in bed. The Galway fella turned out to know a version of Spancil Hill with a verse I'd never heard, and we got him to sing it twice, and there was a thing that happened in the room where everyone just went quiet and listened the way you only listen maybe four times a year. You can't manufacture that. God knows the marketing people have tried.
Then we did the Bog. Obviously. And the Galway fella didn't know the flea verse properly — got the order wrong, came in early — and it descended into the usual lovely chaos, everyone shouting corrections, Mick declaring as he always does that the whole younger generation has lost the run of themselves. And I laughed til my chest hurt. Genuine, helpless laughing. About a man getting a flea wrong.
Here's what I keep landing on, and I'm 46 now so I'm allowed the odd bit of musing.
You don't get to know in advance which nights are the good ones.
That's it. That's the lesson, if it's even a lesson. When I was younger I thought I could tell. I thought tiredness was information — that being knackered meant the night WANTED me to stay in, that the body knew. It doesn't. The body's a liar at six o'clock on a Friday. The body just wants the sofa. And the sofa is grand, the sofa has its place, but the sofa has never once in my life given me a story I'd still be telling six months on.
The only way to find the good night is to go to the night.
I think about this with the site too, if I'm honest. There were years I let this place go dark. Years I couldn't be bothered, thought nobody was reading, that the internet had moved on and left this little shrine in the digital bog where I'd built it. And it would've been so EASY to leave it down. The early night of websites. But I came back, and look — you're here. We're here. Whatever this strange warm thing is.
Showing up is nearly the entire game. It's not a glamorous truth. It won't fit on a mug (though if it would I'd probably sell it, the merch has gone to my head). But it's true. Half the great moments of my life arrived because I dragged myself somewhere I didn't want to go, and the other half I probably missed because I didn't, and I'll never know what they were, and that's the part that gets me a bit when I think about it too long.
I got home at half one. Cold, delighted, voice gone. The cat was exactly where I'd left him, deeply unimpressed that I'd disturbed him by existing. Cup of tea fully arctic.
Worth every step.
Go to the session, lads. Even when you don't want to. ESPECIALLY when you don't want to. And if you can't get to one, learn a few verses and start your own — that's allowed, that's how every session started, with one stubborn person who turned up.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Mick claims he only texted me because he wanted a lift home. He does not have this in writing. I do. I'm framing it.
P.P.S. — Rattlin has not forgiven me and it's now been a fortnight. He sits with his back to me. Sixteen years of this cat and he still finds new ways to express disappointment. Class animal.