I believe that Sam Lee is not booked at Sidmouth - and I think that probably means that he will not be there to make a contribution to the discussion and the absence of such a well motivated club organiser will be a considerable loss to the meeting. His contribution as a young organiser is huge and runs beyond his involvement in the organisation of the Magpie's Nest Club to his time working for both Folk South-West and the EFDSS. When he has stayed at our house, we have picked one another's brains about club organisation and the nearly 40 years difference in our ages are irrelevant to our desire to pursue the same ends.

I have also enjoyed discussions with the two admirable young women who run the Kit & Cutter club at Deptford though one of them looked a bit sheepish when I told her that the album that her father, Tony Weatherall, played on was the best album of English traditional tune playing that I had heard in many a year; she said that she would listen to it carefully.

Jon Boden, something of a workaholic, has somehow managed to fit in organising a folk club amongst the 101 other musical and family things that he is committed to.

Three things are fairly obvious to me:-
* The folk club organisers who have been working at it for decades don't have a monopoly of good ideas.
* The young folk club organisers who have emerged in the last few years don't have a monopoly of good ideas.
* There has been an incredible upsurge of interest and performance in the traditional music of these islands in the last ten years or more and folk clubs have been slow in getting in on the action.