I had a friend who started playing a jig at a blue-grass session... Folkies are not all as tolerant of diversity as catters seem to be.

Most times you get a bunch of musicians together for any length of time they'll find something to quarrel about.

It's not wholly a bad thing either - groups split, and you end up with more groups. People get on each others nerves at a session, and you get them going off and colonising some other pub for a new session.

Getting older doesn't mean getting more tolerant and mellow, not for many of us.

So you get a bunch of aging musicians living in each others pockets all the year round, there'll be murder. Which has its up side - there is nothing like a good feud to keep you young at heart.

What I can envisage isn't a comfy respectable seaside village, with golf and crochet in between the sedate musical get togethers.

It's more of a mountainy set up, with little settlements of feuding neighbours plotting vengeance in the kitchen, and playing good music on the front porch, and acting civilised at the dances that get set up by the nice people who are trying to get us to get along with each other.

And we'd have some great wakes.

A slightly less urban version of Desolation Row, maybe.

For the last few - not so few - years I've been going to a round of festivals - Sidmnouth, Fylde, Whitby. See the same people, all getting a bit older, shrugging tolerantly or dismissively at the young sharp toothed musicians who play everything too fast ( and pointing out to our neighbours that it's a lot harder to pay slow).

I'm always quite glad to get home, and off to the pub to play with a few mates.

But I'd certainly like to pay a visit to the Mudcat Reservation.

But it'd be better to do it over in Europe, where there's better free health care and fewer nuts with guns, and I could come and visit.