Reality check: Tenterden last year, fine muddy field, long wet grass, lots of empty space, no-one asked what side I was with or which booked guest I was (no water and no bogs, but I have a bog in the vardo and can carry water), walking distance from the sings/sessions if I only took one guitar, the mandolin and the bodhran. Like anyone else I put my quids in the tins whenever asked, and I paid my whack for the camping field. Hell, I'd have paid more to camp in that field than the real campsite out of town that I used the year before. Officially I had to be a guest or with a side: unofficially it was open house.

Only two downsides to that Tenterden (three if you count getting out of the boggy field).

The upstairs sinaground was even more hushed and orderly than usual, and the loony kiddies with the tunable didge and who impounded my guitar (leaving me to play mandolin only) were not there for the Sunday afternoon session. The year before that session wasn't folk but it was massive fun. On the other hand the sea-song mass-sing 2006 was both huge fun and informative.

No winges! And people seemed to be liking what was occurring.

Yes, I do quite a lot of miserable songs. Almost all of them trad (or ish). I'm not a singer songwhiner, and I don't sing my diary.

Many festivals would be vastly inferior without the fringe. Take Sweeps. 15 years ago there was acoustic music in every pub (and on every corner) up and down the High Street (and, miracuously Ben McManigan in all of them simultaneously too), and the Eagle was heaving to real music. Now the pubs are full of electric crap and country, and the festival has lost its soul.

Take Tenterden. What would it be without the three or four sessions going on simultaneously? What will it be next year without the 8 Bells?

Campus festivals are not the same as street and town festivals. I don't expect a daytime fringe at Ely, and I don't expect to be on the campus without paying. But the nights there, playing hunt the capo after 2 bottles of Chateau-Neuf-Du-Pape (ask Bardon, I have elided two stories here) are great - although not fringe.

What makes Edinburgh? Not really a music festival, I know, but it's the fringe.

Sidders - ask Bardon: it's the fringe.

Broadstairs - losing it without the fringe.

Cambridge - don't make me laugh. Whatever happened to main stage 6? Some oldies will know.

The more I rant, the madder it makes me (and the whisky helps). Folk music is not bums on seats listening to the deus ex macchina. It's the music people make, their interpretation of their cultural heritage (er, not all music people make, before we get on to horses again).

Go to concerts if you want to. Don't expect me to subsidise them or the flipping Royal Opera House. I'm not the parasite here. The leech is someone else.