> I do love the harmonium sound, usually mellower than accordion or melodeon, they're not too loud to sing against, and are capable of producing wonderful arrangements in the right hands.

Ross has just said everything I was about to write. You play an instrument because you love its sound, love singing to it, love how it blends with other instruments. The harmonium was always one of my favourite components in the Muckram Wakes' sound. And of course I used to play one myself in the duo with Packie. Always loved the texture it added. When we first started out I played a tiny antique mahogany one with ivory keys, which had been used in a ship's chapel (or whatever the nautical term is) in Victorian times; then later I acquired a larger sturdier one with a swell and an extra bank of reeds which we bought from Joby Blanshard, Isobel Sutherland's husband, who did them up as a hobby (you should have seen their house - a reed-keyboard wonderland). I still have both of them, they are still in perfect working order, and the Victorian one stands open by a farmhouse window next to an antique drawing-room harp made in 1837. There's something magic for me about instruments that have lived such a long life and can still speak. The little ship's harmonium has been promised to a maritime museum when I finally go join the heavenly band. Hope someone will play it.

I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that Saro's harmonium is a lovely one too. Packie got a few of those from a music dealer in Kilburn but in their original state they were free-standing. Having spent a considerable amount of his life folding and unfolding the ones we gigged with, he developed some clear - and very clever - ideas of his own about how to convert them to collapsoble ones, so there are a few Packie-custom-specials floating about. (Though the first time I watched him take a saw to one of the legs I had a fit, because he hadn't told me what he was doing.) I used to play them for fun before they went out to their new homes, and always thought they were great. They're a rarity now, I suppose.

Electronic keyboards these days will do everything the bellow-driven ones would do plus a whole lot more, but they're not quite the same (and you have to plug them in which means trailing wires, scrabbling about looking for an electric socket etc etc etc).

Harmoniums in folk music? As natural a pairing as fish & chips. Unless for some reason you don't like the free-reed sound, what's not to love?