Why waste time arguing about whether floor singers are more necessary than professional guest artists (or vice versa)? Both species have a niche in the ecology of folk music, and life would be less interesting if either became extinct.

It's difficult to slice bread with a spoon, or drink soup with a knife, so we keep both handy in our kitchens. But while we go on and on debating whether the knife is aesthetically more pleasing than the spoon, or the spoon is morally more admirable than the knife, the bread goes stale and the soup gets cold.

I'm tempted to suggest that the same metaphor might be applied to some of the other artificial antitheses which generate so much heat and so little light on this forum - for example the traditional versus contemporary argument - but that might raise the blood pressure of some of our regular correspondents to a dangerous level.

Wassail!