I would hate to see Sidmouth deliberately avoided by folkies for a year but it might teach a few people a much needed lesson in nurturing what is most valuable.

The cutting off of one's nose to spite one's face is an option - but Sidmouth is a holiday resort town and will have visitors next year. Even if you somehow prevent any folkies from adding to this in 2005, it will be difficult to make such a gesture an effective one. Anyone is still as free to choose to enter Sidmouth as they were when Mrs Casey appeared to have preferred to have charged everyone for a festival ticket.

There are village festivals where it would be immediately apperent that folkies had made a concerted point of staying away, but this would never be the case in Sidmouth. However, no one is expecting big name bands and overseas dance troupes, so there will be considerable less folkies in the town anyway and the effect of this, will be felt and noticed.

But who would be most affected by such a gesture? The commercial organiers of the past festivals have gone and the council, if it has not yet felt the full force of the lesson they need to learn, will soon find out. But what is gone is gone, the future is what matters and finding a way that the Sidmouth tradition can always ontinue in the face of such incompetence on the part of the council and whoever - is what matters now.