So I drove out to Doolin on the Saturday. Forty minutes from the house, maybe fifty if there's a tractor, and there's always a tractor. I was only meant to stay for two pints and the early part of the session, on account of I had told Margaret I'd be home at a reasonable hour. Reader, I came home at SEVEN in the morning. I am writing this on the Monday and my voice still sounds like a man who gargled gravel.
Let me set the scene because the scene is half of it.
It was one of the small back-room sessions, not the big tourist one. Maybe nineteen people if you counted the lad asleep in the corner (we did not count him, he was past counting). The host was a fella called Donie — you'd know him, big white beard, plays a concertina like it owes him money, keeps a little black notebook of every tune he's ever learned. That notebook is going to come up later and I dread telling you about it.
Anyway. The first few hours were just GORGEOUS, lads. Festival fiddler Fiona was there, the very same Fiona from the forum, down from Galway with her sister. We had reels, we had a slow air that made a French couple cry into their toasties, we had a bodhrán player who knew when to stop (rare, treasure him). And around eleven there was a stretch where nobody talked at all, just played, and you could hear the rain on the window doing its own quiet percussion. That's the thing nobody tells you about a good session. The best bits are the bits where everyone shuts up.
Then Fiona's sister — Caoimhe, I think, lovely woman, drinks pints of Smithwick's faster than is medically advisable — Caoimhe says "go on Seamus, give us the bog." And I said no. I genuinely said no! I was being SHY. Me. The webmaster of a bog shrine. I think I was nervous because there were real musicians in the room and the bog isn't a tune to show off with, it's a tune to drag everyone into the mud with you.
But she wouldn't let it go and Donie tapped out the count on his knee and that was that. Off we went.
Now if you've ever sung the rattlin' bog properly in a packed room, you know the cumulative thing does something to people. By the fourth verse the French couple were back and trying. By the sixth a German hen party who'd wandered in were doing the responses a half-beat behind, which honestly only made it better, like an echo coming up out of the floor. We got to the flea on the feather on the bird in the egg in the nest — the flea verse is the CLIMAX, I will die on this — and the whole room HOWLED it. The lad in the corner woke up, sang the flea, and went back asleep. A complete man.
Here's where it gets stupid.
Somebody — I want to say it was bog_down_in_the_valley energy but in human form, some young fella from Limerick — somebody says "could you sing it BACKWARDS?" And the correct answer to that is no, you cannot, it doesn't work backwards, the whole point of a cumulative song is the building. But it was half one in the morning and we had all decided we were geniuses, so we TRIED.
It was a catastrophe. A beautiful catastrophe. You start with the flea and you have to peel layers off and everyone disagrees about what comes next and you end up shouting "no no no the EGG, ye eejits, the egg's inside the nest" across a room and somehow it became its own song, this collapsing reverse-bog where the joke was how badly it was going. We did it maybe four times. Each time worse. Each time funnier. Fiona was crying laughing and couldn't play, which for Fiona is a serious condition.
And THIS is when I knocked the pint over.
A full pint of Guinness. Barely touched, the head still on it, sitting too near the edge of the table because I gesture when I sing, I've been told. I flung my arm out doing the "and the GREEN GRASS grew all around" bit and over she went — straight onto Donie's notebook. The little black one. The one with every tune he's ever known in it, in pencil, going back decades.
I have never sobered up so fast in my LIFE. The whole table went quiet the way a room goes quiet when something's actually wrong. I grabbed napkins, I grabbed my own jumper, I was apologising in two languages. And Donie — and this is why Doolin people are made different — Donie just lifted the notebook, shook it once like a wet dog shakes, looked at the brown stain creeping across forty years of tunes, and said:
"Sure they're all in here anyway." And he tapped his own head. And then he played the next reel.
I nearly wept. I bought him pints for the rest of the night that he did not drink because he was too busy playing. The notebook's grand, by the way, I checked with him after — Guinness dries, pencil survives, and now there's a page he calls "the Ennis fella's page" with a Guinness ring on it like a wee brown halo. He says it's the only proof I was ever there.
We finished somewhere around half six with The Parting Glass, which is the only correct way to finish anything, and then sat in the carpark watching the light come up over the Atlantic, not talking, just being knackered together. Best night I've had in a year and I run a website about a SONG, so that's saying something.
I'm telling everyone to go to Doolin. I'm telling NO ONE to sing it backwards.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin was sat on the bonnet of the car when I finally got home at seven, judging me silently, the way only a cat who has never once spilled a pint can judge a man. I gave him the good food anyway. He'd earned nothing. I'm just weak.