Right. Sit down. I need you sitting for this one.
A two-year-old in Donegal did the whole thing. The WHOLE thing. Bog, tree, branch, twig, nest, egg, bird, feather, flea — in order, no skips, no prompting, just a wee girl in a high chair with a yoghurt-smeared face going through the cumulative sequence like she was reading off a teleprompter she cannot possibly have. And the video has nine million views. Nine. MILLION. I have refreshed it three times this morning to check the number is real and it keeps going up, which is somehow worse.
Her name is Saoirse (the caption says so) and she is, I am told by my niece Aoife who sends me these things, "two and three quarters." That three quarters is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because a two-and-three-quarters-year-old should be lucky to remember where she left a biscuit, and this one has internalised a nine-tier nested recursion that grown men have abandoned mid-session in the pub up the road from me. I have SEEN grown men fail at the bird. I watched a fella who teaches mathematics get tangled in the twig. And here's Saoirse, no notes, getting to the flea and then — and this is the bit that finished me — pausing, looking dead into the camera, and going "and the flea on the bird." Beat. "And the bird in the egg." Like she's savouring it. She KNOWS it's the climax. Two and three quarters and she already knows the flea verse is the payoff. I had to put the phone down and have a cup of tea.
I don't understand the algorithm. I want to be honest with you about that. I have run this shrine since 2002 and the thing was a quiet little corner of the web with a hit counter and a guestbook for the better part of twenty years, and now a child eating yoghurt can reach more people in a Tuesday than I reached in a decade. I'm not bitter about it. Mostly. It's just genuinely beyond me how a clip travels that far that fast. Aoife tried to explain "the for-you page" to me over the phone and I nodded along the way you nod at a doctor using a word you don't know, and I came away understanding less than when she started.
Anyway. It wasn't the only one this week, so let me round up the rest while I have you.
There's a fella in Cork — grown man, full beard, hi-vis vest, clearly on a building site on his lunch — who does the entire song with no music, just walking from one end of the scaffolding to the other, getting faster with each verse. By the egg he's basically jogging. By the flea he's sprinting and out of breath and the lads behind him are roaring. Two hundred thousand views and every single comment is somebody's da. I love it. It's exactly the energy the song was built for. If you want to know what I mean by built for it, I've gone on about why this song teaches itself before and I won't repeat the whole lecture.
There's a German class — actual German schoolchildren, in Germany — singing it with the chorus translated and the verse nouns left in English, so it's this gorgeous mongrel thing, "Ho ro, the rattlin' bog" landing in the middle of a sentence I cannot parse. The teacher commented to say they do it every Friday as a memory exercise. I wrote back to thank her and she has not replied, which is fair, she's teaching children and not refreshing a fan site like some people.
And there's one — I'll be careful here because I genuinely can't tell if it's staged — of a barista in Melbourne who claims a customer ordered "a flat white, and the flea on the bird in the egg in the nest." Three thousand views. Probably made up. Made me laugh out loud in the kitchen and frighten the cat, so it's earned its place.
But it's Saoirse I keep coming back to. Nine million people watched a toddler do the bog and the top comment, the one with the most likes, is just: "she's not even slightly impressed with herself." And she isn't. That's the thing that gets me. She's not performing. She's not doing it for the views she can't comprehend. She just knows the song the way I knew my own address as a child — completely, automatically, from somewhere underneath thinking. Some granny or some daddy sang it to her enough times that it went in and stayed. That's how this song has survived for however many hundred years. Not festivals. Not me. Not the algorithm. Wee ones in high chairs, getting it by heart before they can read.
I left a comment. I don't usually. I just wrote "perfect, every word in order, you'd put the pub to shame" and I doubt she'll ever see it, but it felt important to say. If you want the full sequence laid out properly — to check her work, like I did, three times — it's all here on the lyrics page.
Nine million. I'm going to go lie down.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin watched the video over my shoulder, twitched his ears at "the flea," and walked off. No notes from the cat. He's a hard critic and the toddler passed.