When I'm in a session or a folk club, or at a fesrtival, all the people I'm likely to be talking to are interested in folk music, or they wouldn't be there.

Some of the time we talk about music - what was that tune called, do you know this song I'm looking for, what kind of funny tuning are you using, did you know a new session has started in that pub...

Sometimes we talk about other stuff - personal stuff, politics, beer. The difference from conversations elsewhere is that we start from a shared common enthusiasm, which tempers the talk, and gives us common points of reference. Music and song creep, back in - you find yourself emphasising a point by quoting from a song, which you couldn't do in other company.

Every now any again you run into someone who doesn't want to talk about anything except musical trivia - who played second guitar on so-and-so's third album, that kind of stuff. Anything you say will be dragged back to the obsession.

When you find yourself trapped like that, either you start playing or singing, or you make your excuses and leave.

What Lyle just said is exactly right. Except that I suspect the issue at stake isn't really anything to do with the ratio of non-musical posts to musical posts, it's about territory, about resentment of newcomers moving in and taking over space. "I'm just one of the oldtimers who helped make the Mudcat what it was that the new BS crowd wants to get rid of." In a context where being "an oldtimer" means getting there a couple of years earlier than some offending newcomer.

The truth is, trawl back through the archives, it really doesn't look very different, so far as content is concerned. Some of the names are different, is all.