Last night I was watching a programme in a series on BBC 4, a digital TV station here which is putting out some first rate stuff around folk music.

Anyway this one was all about the Lambeg drumming tradition in Northern Ireland, and I had something of the same feeling there.

It was looking at it technically and musically, and as an aspect of a living and changing tradition. But one which has been bound up in a history of oppression and repression and segregation and sectarianism. And yet it was bringing out the truth about how superficial and petty and, please God transient, are these antagonisms in Northern Ireland.

And you had old men reminiscing about a time when the same drummers playing the same tunes might at times take part in marches of the Orange Order and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. And I wrote in anither thread "Some day there'll be marching bands from both traditions taking part in the same festivals".

Anyway, this thread set me thinking about this, and how you can have situations in which essentially decent people get twisted in their thinking and their feeling, and still retain so much that is still decent and wholesome.

How do we manage to break with the evil of the past, and still hold on to the "good", knowing that the "good" is interwoven through and through with evil? Sometimes I've felt critical of the way in which Germans who are into folk music often seem to turn away completely from their own traditions - and yet I can see how it could seem the only thing to do in face of history.