The trouble is, Dick is a glass-half-full optimist who sees no cause for concern, whereas Jim (and myself and a few others) are simply being realistic.
I'm sure there are plenty of clubs that happily continue entertaining their regulars and providing a darned good evening's entertainment - as I said earlier, clubs like Sharp's, Maidenhead and Herga should be national treasures. They are the well run clubs that are indeed so important. But there are also many clubs that are bloody dire.
But even the well-run clubs tend to attract the same people - when I go to clubs I so often see 'the usual suspects'; the faces I see everywhere and (like my own) they're not getting any younger.
My own feeling, and nothing I've read here has altered it, is that the 'folk club' has had its heyday and we are now in the twilight years. And, just as there are still a few - a very few - pubs that have a trad jazz session of a Sunday, I'm sure some folk clubs will continue. But many will surely fade and wither as their punters do, and will eventually fold because no new blood is interested in attending.
Plenty enough have already gone that way, and plenty more will follow - and the sort of complacency that insists that 'nothing's wrong, so we don't need to do anything' will speed the decline.
OK, so it's an unpopular view, and I would love those who argue against it to be right, but I fear too many heads are in the sand. Folk music will endure as long as there are people, but folk clubs?