Hi Cecil Sharp Ate My Hamster and welcome to Mudcat....

Good Grief! It's YOU!

i) An irritating but fairly amusing wind-up merchant... Now that I can live with.

And I can cope with Subcomandante Snail and even folk club Stalinist even if I don't know what I've done to deserve them. My crack about revealing your identify to the citizens of Mudcaster was intended as banter in the same vein. It seems my timing was bad; I didn't realise "unpleasant things" were happening to you. I must say though that if you insist on rattling your stick against the bars of the cage, it is best to make sure the door is locked first.

ii) The last thing I would want to do is damage your (or anyone else's) reputation or that of the Lewes Arms - I was merely semi-flippantly responding to your earlier comments. Maybe your writing style comes over as more pugilistic than you intend and mine comes over as less frivolous than I intend.

This is a different matter. It's hard to know if you thought through what you were saying. It has become fashionable amongst some people (fortunately, very few) to claim that there is a widespread opinion that professional folk performers are an abomination, money grabbing harlots blah, blah, blah... I see very little evidence that anyone holds that opinion and those that make the claim have become increasingly equivocal about who they are accusing. I have been directly accused of it myself by someone of rather more influence than you. I think the people making this claim are doing serious damage to the folk scene by spoiling relations between folk professionals and the volunteers who run the folk infrastructure. So, sorry if I seem pugilistic but this is something that matters to me.

Earlier on this thread Tom Bliss reported that 101 clubs on his database have closed since 2001. It could be that the organisers just got fed up with the abuse being hurled at them. After all, now they are being held responsible for the smell in the gents.