As long as I've been coming to the Mudcat (back in the last century) every now and then we get occasional moral panics, and Jeremiads about how the Mudcat has degenerated from a former Golden Age, and how nasty it all is these days. And the Golden Age in question is always a time when there were people just that same thing.

To me it seems as if it's still much the same ramshackle assembly of songsters, oddballs, jokers and beady-eyed obsessives it's always been. The same kind of crowd you might get at a folk club or festival, with the bonus that it's a much more international crowd than you ever get in real life.

There's the occasional nasty character hangs around for a bit, or sometimes the nasty side of some generally OK character reveals itself, but it rarely gets out of hand. We probably owe a lot of thanks to Joe and the clones for behind the scenes work on that, accepting that can't be easy, and that if the occasional mistake gets made that's understandable.

Basically, the Mudcat continues to be something for which I am extremely grateful, and value enormously.