OK, Dave, in the best "'Allo, 'Allo" tradition, "I will say zis only vunce":

It is not the existence of any English Folk Awards that would hurt me, but your persistence in certain directions, which only serves to disillusion me. You see, when we first came across each other here and on mySpace, I thought innocently that there were some touch-points between us. Because in my 19 years on this island, and with the help of the English rose that shared 35 years with me and the many friends I made here, I learned more than the language; I got to understand the culture(s) here, the good and the bad, and they are second nature to me now (plagiarising Prof Higgins here).

My own existence in two cultures made me question early on where do I stand myself, what am I. The answer I came up with is "in both places", in other words I love, and am proud of, both my inherited and my adopted cultures. I would neither abandon my Greekness, neither would I shun my learned "Englishness". And from that I made the logical step that one ought to remain proud of their own culture, even while they recognise their less savoury aspects and try to correct them.

So, some of your early statements of belief found ready-ploughed ground in me. But not long afterwards I realised that you were prepared to go much further than I was, in order to recognise, celebrate and preserve what you profess to hold dear. And also that the English culture you refer to contains a number of "romantic" (perhaps mythical) elements, which I, of course, coming into it as an 18 year old, did not inherit or adopt. We may both use the words "Englishness", "preserve" etc, but our perspectives are different. Furthermore, you have proved very insistent (a-la-Roger Gall) both in trying to persuade others of your views, and amazingly impervious to the arguments of others (I am referring to the less scatological ones here, though I do actually like catspaw and frequently smirk when he calls a spade a shovel).

Extremism is often not a matter of beliefs, but of degree. And I find that the degrees to which you seem to be prepared to go, or at least that you advocate, truly foreign to me. Furthermore, I fear that extremist ideas, as they polarise the world around them, effectively muzzle reasonableness.

It is therefore the danger to reason that I mourn. And also my mistaken initial belief that we shared a common understanding on the subject of English culture and what to do (and what NOT to do) in its interest.