Well, maybe they ain't anti-semitic, but some of them are over-the-top when it comes to keeping women out of it. I'm not taking about the heated question of whether there should be single-sex dance-teams - that seems as reasonable with Morris dancing as it does with cricket and football and hurling.

But when you get a Morris side who won't allow females on the same bus as them, as happened recently with one local side near us recently - that's what I mean by over-the-top. I wonder - do they have Morris dancing on Mount Athos?

That's maybe trhread drift. But there's a relevance to it. In the Engish tradition", there is ritual dancing (Morris and other sorts), and there is barn-dance type social dancing, and there is individual clog dancing occasionally - but there seems to be no equivalent of the Irish sett dance, the sort you can get in the corner of a pub, in a lively session. Or if it exists it's existence kept very quiet.

So far as I can see, there are plenty of dances, both in the barn dance and in the Morris dance traditions, which are perfectly well suited to be English set-dances. I think that this gap is a major factor in holding back the ability of Engish traditional music to broaden its appeal, and to be able to feed into the new multicultutal traditions that are developing.