Now there's a time for thread drift, and theres a time to avoid it, and this is a time and place where the old give and take of national variations and teasing and pedantry, and so forth, all of which can be fun enough, just doesn't belong. (Like most people here I refer to it as September 11 to be clearer, and because anyway, I never use numbers to refer to dates in speech. Give me a date with numbers and I always have to do mental arithmetic, unless maybe it's January.)

Yes, we're invisible and unheard, as InOBU reminds us. That's not all bad. It puts us on the same side of the divide as all the ordinary people who've sung and made music all the centuries, and on the other side from the music industry that stands over us mechanically churning stuff out. But I predict that, just as has always been the case, it'll be our side of the divide that will be searched out and will be the stuff of the oral history, when it gets written.