Songs stay with you for funny reasons. This one has no real personal meaning, but I will never forget the circumstances under which I first heard it.

Some years a go a couple of friends and I spent a summer wandering around Ireland, searching out musicians and pub sessions. Every day was much the same. It started out with a nasty hangover. After a greasy B&B breakfast, we drove somewhere, and after a bit of desultory site-seeing, found another B&B. Then it was off to whatever pub offered the best hope of a session, and the chance to hear or play some tunes. Sometimes the evening ended there, sometimes it got more elaborate. In Galway someone told us about Doolin. Doolin is a tiny town just below the Cliffs of Moher, where musicians from across Europe were reputed to gather for the best sessions on the island.

To our astonishment, (Irish tourist directions tending to be a bit wobbly), this turned out to be true. Traditional music fans of all ages and nations were gathered there, it was like an informal festival. A tear of monster proportions ensued. On our fourth night there, we discovered that the pub would sell you a few cases of beer out the back after closing. Somehow we gathered a large party, and after a raucous hike through the country, we broke into an abandoned farmhouse down a wooded lane. By now things were getting a little blurry, but I recall stumbling around the barnyard, fetching bits of wood. One of the less inebriated partiers managed to get a fire going in the farmhouses' old hearth, and soon the scene was cozy indeed. Some of the party had instruments, and the session was soon going strong again, 20 or 30 drunks, some locals, but most from elsewhere, all swigging warm beer and shouting at each other, lit by the roaring blaze.

Some time later, I was engrossed in one of those conversations that only happens on evenings like that. I believe I was discussing why I had never become a pilot, but it could have been just about anything. Whoever I was talking too was embarked upon a similar flight of fancy, anyway. In the middle of us spouting nonsense at each other, someone in a thick German accent started shouting that the room was on fire. I took a quick glance at the hearth, where indeed a sheet of flame was shooting up the wall.

Bedlam ensued, as the whole tribe began shouting and running into one another, all trying to escape a fiery death. Rather than just walking out the front door, (which we had earlier removed), for some reason I began kicking planks out of a large window on which I had been leaning. I was about to climb out when I noticed a girl next to me, who was just standing there screaming. In an act of heroism, I picked her up, (she was fairly small, I suppose, it's hard to recall now), climbed up on the sill, and leapt out. I felt a sharp pain in my leg on the landing, but we were in a hay-filled farmyard, and it was pitch black, so it was no time to investigate. The girl said something to me in a language with which I was not familiar, (presumably a thank-you for saving her life), and joined the rest of the crowd, who were booting it down the lane as fast as they could stumble.

Suddenly it was silent in the yard. There was no sign of my friends. I stood there for a second, and then decided to go back in, just in case more heroism was necessary. Once again, rather than using the door, I climbed back in the window. Inside, all was calm and peaceful. My two friends stood there sipping beer, along with a fit looking guy from the North, Portadown if I recall. While the rest of us had been panicking, they extinguished the blaze with the rest of the beer, the Portadown guy assisting with a prodigious pee. They expressed some disappointment that the party had ended badly, and then one of them asked about my leg.

I looked down. One leg of my jeans was shredded, and there was an eight inch gash from my knee to the ankle. With that grim fatalism common to both Newfoundlanders and the Irish, everyone agreed that I had no doubt cut myself on a rusty scythe or something equally dreadful, and that blood poisoning was inevitable. As we were miles from anywhere, and it was the middle of the night, going to a hospital was out of the question. Instead I washed it as best I could with the remains of a flask, and decided to hope for the best.

The next day was grim indeed. We all had monumental hangovers, and I was limping heavily, convinced that any moment a case of tetanus was going to set in. It was foggy and rainy, and only one of the three pubs was open, a depressing, brightly lit room that was more like a hospital café. The merry crowd from the night before was gone forever, and the only other customers were two scruffy Irish hippies, who looked to be in as poor a state as ourselves.

We spent the afternoon there, munching stale cheese sandwiches and pots of tea. There was nowhere else to go. One of the Irish guys produced a battered tin whistle and began to play music like I have never heard before or since. In his hands it was an orchestra, and he barely stopped for breath. Slow airs morphed into bright reels, followed by improvised pieces that wrapped around themselves like Indian ragas. It was utterly unique. Not to be outdone, the other guy took out a guitar, and when his partner took a break, sang a song, Donegal Danny.

Written by Irish songwriter Phil Coulter, the song is a memorable tale of a man who loses his friends when their fishing boat founders. It is long, and absorbing, and the singer sang it with all the pathos and passion it deserved. Sad and melancholy, it was perfectly suited to that misty afternoon. He sang it so well that all three of us, who had never heard the song before, remembered it ever since.

There are many versions out there, but it does not really matter who is singing it for me to be instantly back once again in Doolin, sick & hungover, terrified I had lockjaw, tired and cold, yet utterly transfixed by the power of that ballad.