And ALWAYS be Folk to someone too, regardless of any orthodoxy or consensus, because these things have a life of their own, just as they did Back In The Day when the Old Songs ranged throughout the English Speaking World in feral abundance until licked into shape in the name of Folklore, without which, of course, most of us might never have got wind of them in the first place. BUT, like other examples of exhibited savagery (the shrunken heads in the Pit Rivers Museum come to mind, similarly 'Collected' and 'Itemised' and subject to the objective scrutiny of an Imperialistic Academia) we can can only press our faces against the glass and gaze in mute horror as we imagine sights unseen, now sanitised for the entertainment of the civilised. The Folk Heritage is hoary horror on a cultural feedback loop, echoing from generation to generation as they decide what it means to them and redefine notions of Tradition and Invention just as MacColl and his ilk did back in their day. Like Religion, it remains very much Optional, despite the overtones of Pure Blood Authenticity one still encounters like when Steve Roud announced a few years back (somewhere on this very forum) that a Bogus Folksong (.e. Shoals of Herring) becomes a Real Folksong when collected from a Bonafide Traditional Folksinger & earns the Chufty Badge of a Road Number. Seems to me only a matter of time before The Revealing Science of God gets a Roud Number too. It is, God knoweth, this sort of nonsense that puts me right off however much I might love the scholarship otherwise.

Fly fishing, Old Man? Nah. I was always more of a guddling man myself. Cheaper and more effective when there's hungry mouths to feed.