"Ruth - if you were using your posts to promote ENGLISH culture (rather than Americanisation), if you weren't constantly attacking my character and telling me to "go home", and if you came across as a more reasonable competent person, I WOULDN'T mind you having gained such opportunity."

That's one of the funniest posts I have ever read in my life, and awfully magnanimous of you, Wavey. I'd be very interested to know how I'm promoting Americanisation, apart from being American. Unlike you, I don't really like to blow my own trumpet about my achievements, but if you want to question my "competence", here are some excerpts from my recent CV:

Programme and Marketing Manager at a venue where I developed a strong programme of folk music (with an emphasis on English music), supported a composition project and showcase of new music by English traditional musicians, started a ceilidh series and ran a folk festival with a whole strand exclusively dedicated to English traditional music. Started an outreach project with local schools where kids learned traditional dance incuding rapper, longsword, morris and clog.

Currently the Artisitc Director of one of England's most prominent folk festivals, as well as the outreach officer for a project which develops and carries on the work we started at my venue with young people and traditional dance.

I am on the National Council for EFDSS, and as their representative was responsible for creating and delivering Saturday's Vaughan Williams celebration at Cecil Sharp House (you'll find details above the line).

Worked on other festivals and events as part of a wider career in Arts Management. I started running music sessions and one-off folk events about 20 years ago, as well as volunteerring at all sorts of events.

Admittedly, I've been a bit busy in the past few years to catch every single BBC folk programme or indeed to learn top-line melodies on my English nose flute, but the idea that, by challenging your dubious Nationalistic and racist tendencies I am not promoting English culture, is one I feel compelled to dispute. I love English culture, but abhor the way that you and your ilk twist it to suit your own deeply flawed political agenda.

Of course, I've probably only managed to do all this stuff because I'm a foreigner, and the government hands us everything on a plate. Once upon a time every foreigner got handed a corner shop on arrival, eh, Crocodile Dundee? Now they just give us a folk festival.