This is all interesting stuff: one of the things I didn't mention when I was talking about my own introduction to folk is that in the 80s, when i was in California, I lived with a family who had been responsible for starting the Irish Arts Centre in New York, and then the Celtic Arts Centre in Los Angeles. They owned a farm in Cape Breton, and used to go there each summer, taking along whoever wanted to come, to work, play music, and absorb the astonishing culture which survived there. It's one of my great regrets that I didn't go - what with working and all, it was a case of, "There'll always be next year..." And of course I never made it.

What I didn't realise was that this was, in itself, something of a revival culture. It was presented to me as an extraordinary case of survival. It's interesting to think about how many traditional cultures (not just in Britain but around the world) which appear to be spontaneously thriving, have, in their histories, some level of interventionism. One even wonders what the state of English folk culture would be today without "folk police" like Cecil Sharp and his ilk.