I have just been reading through this thread agian and I read a couple of comments that got me thinking again.

One involved joining in. The session environmet is my favourite and to me, every time you get a bunch of musicans playing well together and really enjoying the music, it is a completely new and fantastic exerience - they are all different to me.

The other was a comment about debuts. My first experience of playing in public occured as a result of a few friends of mine dragging me up on stage during a folk night on a New Years Eve. A drunk in the audience decided he didn't like my playing and I ended up being dragged of stage (together with the guitar I had borrowed) by him. At the time, I (wrongly) blamed my musical ability as being the reason and it took me a good couple of years to feel confident about doing a floor spot in a folk club again.

Jon