Look, for pity's sake, why can't everyone just stop bickering and let people get on with the festival. I'm going to plead my case here.....

I'm JeZeBeL, who a few of you may know, from Yorkshire, and I'm 24 years old. I thought one of the reasons for having festivals was not just to let people from all over the world have a good time, but also to keep the tradition flowing for the generations to come.

There are few enough young folk musicians, singers etc as it is, so please, if people don't stop arguing over little things like this then that's going to diminish.

Folk festivals are there for everyone to enjoy a good time, play music, sing, dance, do whatever you want. It's an escape from the real world for a weekend, or a week, or even longer, and whether it be a huge internationally renowned festival, or a village trying to host one for the very first time, we should all support it if we enjoy it and try to keep them going for the years to come.

I can appreciate that people may have a few quarms about things such as security and safety etc, but this thread is not the place for it. We have things such as PM's on here and they can be used privately for whatever you want to say. Keep this a friendly, encouraging area, so that when people come along to look at it they can go, wow, i think I'd really like to be involved with that one way or another, rather than seeing everyone fight.

Seeing people bickering like this is one of the things that gives folkies a bad name in a lot of people's eyes, and I knwo I try damned hard to bring them round to how nice we really are, and just how devoted we are to keeping the tradition alive.

I will not be giving up folk music because of this, don't get me wrong, and I would also like to help out at the festival as I love stewarding, purely for the fact of helping people like liz mentioned earlier. I just need to knwo when it is please.

I don't know how my life would be if I didn't have folk music, but I knwo it wouldn't be as rich and enjoyable, and I certainly wouldn't have met as many lovely wonderful people as I have in the folk scene.

Don't spoil that.

Jez xxx