Shlio, you live in Essex and have yet to come across any fellow young folkies? The county is crawling with them! Let me first introduce you to Mawkin . This is a young ceilidh band from Moreton, closely involved in the running of the festival there and containing, moreover, a stepdancing champion (age 17) who is also a morris dancer. I'll tell him you may be getting in touch via the site.

This is but a beginning. Young people are playing traditional music to an extremely high standard everywhere, aided by weekend workshops and summer schools such as Folkworks, Shooting Roots and the Ethno Camp run by Mudcat's own Sam Pirt. They are the mainstay of the vibrant e-ceilidh network, of sessions and festivals.

You don't find too many of them in the 'folk clubs' though. Why? They have attempted to breach the very real barriers into these (on the whole) unwelcoming, cliquey timewarps held in dingy pub backrooms peopled by bearded or floating Laura Ashley-clad throwbacks who talk down to them, tell them to do it 'our' way or else piss off. So they do and I don't blame them.

Congratulation to Vectis for retaining 'a handful' of the species at his folk club. Please don't patronise them or tell them they cannot perform music in a way that's relevant to them, stripped of arcane language and 60s revival pretentiousness. In that way, you might just keep them.

Our heritage of tradtional music is priceless and deserves the utmost respect. The young players do this in a way that we of the first revival very often did not. Go on. admit it.   While it is imperative to respect the tradition, conventions can, and sometimes ought to be, broken. If it doesn't work, no harm is done and you try it again another way on another day.   As Martin Carthy famously said, you can only actually harm the music by not performing it at all.

We've had lengthy discussion before on Mudcat about the parlous state of the British folk clubs but it's worth repeating here how I have been truly ashamed when taking friends, whether ceilidh contacts or total newcomers, into clubs and seeing them disillusioned by the sheer awfulness of the experience.

These young people are beginnning to show you the way forward already, if you'd listen. If you won't, they'll overtake you anyway, And the future of our music is safe in their hands.