Funny but I have heard just about every form of folk music you can think of in a folk club and what's more, we clapped having enjoyed most of it.

A post somewhere above said people don't relate to Imagined Village. Correct. But Imagined Village related to the multicultural society we live in, whereas trouser tit aficionados rattle on about music of the people. By their reckoning, folk means stopping the clock at some idyllic point in time.

In 1954, music of the people was Max Bygraves doing the working men's clubs and a young Morcambe and Wise doing the end of pier shows.

Benjamin Zephaniah and Eliza Carthy singing Tam Lin Retold, about as good a bridge between traditional music and music of the people as you will ever hear in my opinion. Yet just like the "working people" MacColl patronised and romanticised, the people it reflects have possibly never heard it. Yet if they did, there is more chance of people liking it than the latter. In a pit of 2,600 men, only two to my knowledge had heard The Big Hewer. I was one. The other came to folk clubs too.

Michael scoffs at the idea of folk clubs trying to entertain. It would be funny if Jim said it but a bit sad coming from Michael.

No matter. Jim will be back from Dublin soon. He will have filled his boots with the authentic Dublin folk music. (Every fecking pub having a kid in the corner with a guitar singing Galway Girl and Tart with a Cart for the American tourists.)