And regards to you as well, Warwick! Yes, I suppose I could be called "semi-pro" - used to be fully pro at one time - but I've never considered an unpaid performance any less demanding or less worthy of preparation than a paid one. It's still people sat in front of you, after all.

Incidentally, if you've done 90 minutes on stage - paper or not- then I say, "Well done!"

I suppose that, over the years, I've sat as an audience member in many folk clubs on several occasions. Latterly - by which I mean the last 10 years or so - I have been so bored by whole evenings of lamentable, paper-shuffling, note-peering performers, that I've lost the will to live. I vowed I just wouldn't go back to those places. So, if I sound a little jaded about all this, there are reasons for it!

I run a monthly music session/singaround down here in Sussex, and we regularly have attendees who sing from sheets. It's a singaround, really - certainly not a club - and I have absolutely no problem with it at all, though I do encourage people to have a crack at doing it all without benefit of paper.

At the other monthly session - also in Sussex - that I help to run, we don't use paper on the whole. And it's a cracking session - fiddles, guitars, mandolins, nyckelharpa, whistles, serpent - why, I even encourage a chorus of shaky eggs when singing one of my 1920s bits of trivia!