Hello Jag

I don't have any simple answers to your questions? But the answer to the last one will probably be 'yes'.

Interesting comparison with butterfly collecting etc. I had thought of dinky cars as a comparison with song collection. Similar liking for the 'rare' has struck me in both hobbies. Also a certain focus in number: the more you 'collect' the prouder you can be of your collection. I'd better not mention 'packaging' since though this definitely improves the value of a dinky car it won't be a metaphor people approve of when applied to folk.

But even with dinky cars, some people might ask the interesting question why dinky cars, what is the fascination and so on, what is culturally interesting about the 'car' and why were children given them to play with, especially in the coming post-oil world … (?)

Just in passing, I looked again at a piece by Beaman, arch critic of Harker. He is political from the outset. Referring to the revival of Sharp's day he says and I quote: '... for a brief moment it looked as if a genuine, indigenous and unifying national culture might have been discovered. This however was a false dawn.'

This is from Beaman's 'Who Were the Folk' article, in which he has one or two criticisms of Sharp as well as more or less open contempt for Harker and little time for Lloyd.

He criticises those who try to portray 'folk' as belonging to the working class. In what seems to me to be rhetorical rather than scholarly comment he says that the approach leads to a kind of inverted snobbery and that it leads to a situation where there is an insistence that the only proper mode for the performance of folk music is "an informal, amateurish and 'amateurish' one which faithfully reflects its supposed social origins and leads to displays of suspicion, resentment and restrictiveness when the material is used outside this 'working class' role." He goes on to dis Georgina Boyes' critique of something Vaughan Williams produced.

I'm sure there is quite a lot of 'theorising' about fossils, if not 'fossil collections' by the way and some controversy too (evolution v creationism). One of my grandma's believed that fossils etc were traps set by the devil. (We didn't get on too well).