Let the young bands do their thing - good luck to 'em, I say. Youth will have its fling - and so will Age, given half a chance.

Spare a thought for the ageing newbie! My biggest regret in this area is that I started singing out regularly at the age of 42, instead of 22 (or 12). My second biggest is that I didn't find my way to the trad repertoire (and Mudcat!) for quite a few years after that. It meant that I was doing my growing-up-in-public (you know the kind of thing - "This is a traditional song by Nic Jones", "This one was collected by a guy called Frankie Armstrong"...) at an age when I should have been having my mid-life crisis. (On second thoughts maybe that was...)

Young newcomers seem to get a different kind of attention, probably because it's just so nice when the average age in the room goes down. And it's usually true that if a newcomer's young they're also new to the stuff, and would welcome the odd pointer - but it's not true that older geezers aren't new to it. So the next time you see a shy-looking middle-aged guy in the corner mumbling something about how he might know a song or two, don't assume he's just being modest and he's been singing at the next folk club but two for the last 20 years - maybe he actually does know a song or two, and maybe he'd like to be pointed towards some more.

I was OK, though - I had Mudcat to fall back on, where I could ask as many stupid questions and admit as much ignorance as I liked ("so, what's Paul Bellamy doing these days?").