Here's an example of how persistence, luck and a bit of je-ne-sais-quoi can get you gigging. It may not work in the folk world, but it works elsewhere.

Four years ago, I decided to run an acoustic session in my local pub - second Sunday of the month - a mixed, eclectic session with anybody and everybody welcome, and anything musically that people fancied. So I put a notice to that effect on the inside of the pub's front door. The first few sessions were very sparsely attended, as you might expect and, some evenings, there were just two or three of us. But we persisted. One evening, Di, who lives a couple of miles away turned up with her guitar, and with Chris, her guitarist partner - who turned out to be a damned good guitarist. I liked his style and he liked mine. Slowly the session grew to its present level of about 10 participants - more than enough for the small public bar we play in.

At Christmas two years ago, the landlady asked if I could organise some rock'n roll in the pub for the village's late night shopping evening. I said I could and got together with Di and Chris to do a couple of early evening hours as part of the night's fun. A great success - why, we even got paid! And we repeated the evening last Christmas. Various people heard us play and Chris and I were asked to do various functions - a local birthday party, a community centre bash in Brighton, and recently an evening of electric jazz for the civil partnership post-ceremony bash of some neighbours. The jazz went down OK, and the landlady has asked us to play one Sunday lunchtime a month. We've also done a local Gardens & Arts weekend, and we're booked to play at a mini-beer festival at a pub up the road. And we have a couple of charity freebies lined up.

So many people asked us for a card - which we didn't have - that we had to jot down telephone numbers on scraps of paper! So I got some cards printed and decided that, if we were going to do it more regularly, a website and a sample batch of audio files would be a good idea. So, I picked a domain, set up a website, and made some recordings to put on Soundcloud (to be embedded in the website).

So, here we are - making music, getting a few gigs, trousering some cash to pay for beer, petrol and strings - and (very importantly) having fun! None of it would have happened without the urge to do it - whatever it is...