Well I agree with GUEST in everything he says in his last post, though I am too much of a realist to accept his kind compliment.. :0)

He is right on the button with the remarks about stalking and taking ill feeling from one thread to another.
Although we may disagree on one subject, on others we may be comrades if we allow our perceptions "free rein".

Jim and I have battled for years but recently I discovered that I share his radical views on folk music.

I agree with him that the culture of the old time travellers should be encouraged and supported, but it's thirty years since I met a genuine traveller...the wheel may yet spin into more of a subsistence economy where travelling people will have a full part to play and a full contribution to make.

Jim says that the old culture was a load of romanticised nonsense, then goes on to say that travellers have been negatively affected by modern society and assimilation into urban life???

They were a people of their time, as much as is the Gaelic language or the crofting way of life.....they were never really free, none of us are; they were bound by the seasons, the sky above them and the ground beneath their feet.
They were not acquisitive, because in the society that I remember so well, nobody had anything worth stealing and everyone knew that taking from one was robbing the whole community, for we all depended upon one another to a great extent.

Materialism and consumerism has rendered the old travelling people redundant and only a huge change in society can save them.....if that is even possible, we have all become so wrapped up in ourselves and our "rights" that we are hardly worth saving. :0(