I am impressed by the good manners shown, and by the eagerness shown by most people to try to keep disagreements courteous and respectful of genuine differences and sincere disagreements.

Thanks to Max's Magic Super Search I've been digging back into some of the older threads. I don't really think there really is any significant change for the worse in current threads.

Maybe I've missed the threads that moonchild is concerned about. Life is too short to keep up with more than a fraction of them.

I've just looked through the thread Neil Lowe was talking about,the one he started. I think it kept within reasonable bounds throughout, even if it quite understandably got heated at times. I think we should be proud that arguments about things which many of us feel very strongly can be carried out in this way.

There are pubs where there's a house rule that noone talks about anything cotroversial, like politics or religion, or sex. They talk about the weather and football. Though football can lead to heated artguments, so that gets banned too. So it's the weather and staring gloomily into their beer. I don't want usto be like that.

All right, we've got music and song to talk about, and that's what brings us together. But as has often been pointed out, some of this music and song can be as controversial as it gets.

"They always argued. They never quarrelled." That was how G.K.Chesterton's biographer Maisie Ward summed up his relationship with his brother Cecil, with whom he had some profound disagreements.

I'd like it to be possible for people to say that about the Mudcat Cafe. Or maybe we could settle for "They always argued. They rarely quarrelled. They always made up again." And I think that is pretty close to the truth.