I've never told anyone this part.
There was a stretch — I want to say around 2010, give or take, I genuinely lose track of the exact year now — where I had the cancellation email half written. The one to the hosting company. "Please close my account." Cursor blinking after the word account. I sat there for a long time with my hand on the mouse and Rattlin' asleep on the warm bit of the desk where the monitor breathes out its heat, and I very nearly sent it.
I want to tell you why, because I think some of you have been there with your own small thing.
It wasn't dramatic. That's the part nobody warns you about. I half expected the end of the shrine to feel like a funeral, all weighty and meaningful. It didn't. It felt like a Tuesday. A grey one.
The hit counter had been stuck for weeks. Not broken — stuck, in the worse way, where it ticks up by two or three and you KNOW one of those two or three was yourself checking. The guestbook had gone quiet. The last real message before the spam started was from someone called Dymphna in Roscommon and it just said "lovely site," and lads, I read that "lovely site" about forty times over the following months the way you'd worry a stone in your pocket. I'd built this whole place — every garish GIF, every verse annotated, the whole carry-on — and it felt, for a while there, like I was the only one in the room. Singing the bog song to an empty pub. You know the cumulative song needs a crowd. That's the entire POINT of it. The thing falls apart, beautifully, gloriously, when there's only one voice.
And I was tired. I'll be honest with you. It wasn't only the site. Things were hard at home that year in ways that aren't anyone's business but mine, and the shrine had started to feel like one more thing I was failing at. One more lad I'd let down. The HTML felt childish. The enthusiasm I'd had at the start — that 2002 enthusiasm, the YOUTH of it — embarrassed me a bit, if I'm being truthful. Who keeps a fan shrine to a folk song? Grown man. What was I at.
So I wrote the email. And I went to put the kettle on while I worked up the nerve, because that's the Irish way of doing a hard thing, you go and make tea first.
And while the kettle was going, an email came in. To the shrine address.
It was from a man in Saskatchewan. I'd never heard of the place, had to look it up on the map after. He said he'd found the site looking for the words to the song because his father had died — recently, it sounded like, the grief was still raw in how he typed — and his father used to sing the Rattlin' Bog at every gathering they ever had, badly, by his own admission, getting the verses out of order, but singing it. And the man could only remember up to the feather. He couldn't get past the feather. And he'd searched and searched and found my lyrics page, the full thing, every verse in order down to the flea, and he wrote to say that he'd sat at his own kitchen table and sung the whole song through, alone, out loud, for his da. The whole bog. Start to finish.
He just wanted to say thank you. That was the whole email. He didn't know I was a hair's breadth from deleting the very page he was thanking me for.
I never finished the cancellation email. Closed it. I think I cried a bit, actually, standing there with the kettle screaming at me. Forty-something and bawling over a stranger's email. Gas, really.
Here's the thing I understand now that I didn't then. I'd been thinking about the shrine as a thing that needed to be SUCCESSFUL. Numbers. Traffic. The hit counter as a verdict on whether I mattered. But that was never what it was for. It was a candle left burning in a window for whoever happened to be walking past in the dark and needed it. Most nights nobody walks past. That doesn't mean you blow the candle out. You've no idea who's out there on the road.
That man in Saskatchewan never wrote again. I don't even have his name anymore, the old emails are long gone. But I think about him most years. He never knew what he did. He saved the bog without ever knowing the bog was in trouble. That's the kind of thing that keeps a fella humble.
If you've made a small thing — a blog, a zine, a wee corner of the web for some daft passion nobody else seems to share — and you're sat there with your hand on the mouse wondering is it worth it, the answer is you cannot possibly know yet. The thank-you might be ten years out. It might come the very minute you've decided to quit. So leave the candle lit. Annotate your verses. Keep the old guestbook open, even for the spam.
I'm so glad I didn't send that email. This place has given me more than I ever gave it. And it's still here, still standing, all these years on, with the same daft host still tending it.
Slán go fóill,
BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' was asleep on the desk that whole evening and never stirred once, not even when the kettle went. She has always been a steadier hand than me. Still is. Don't ask me how old she is now, I've stopped counting, it only upsets the vet.