Here here Doug.

Mind you, plenty of ruddy mining songs. I preferred to find songs about reed cutting in bloody Norfolk though. Bad enough spending all day or night down the pit without singing about the chuffing place.

I left mining songs to social workers and cost accountants. They seemed to know more about it.

The folk police did more than their fair share to turn people off and the sad demise of folk clubs. These days, it's all singarounds with pieces of paper and cookbook holders. Rather sad to read that having bollocksed up clubs, some of the old sods are unrepentant.

Folk is thriving. The music coming out is exciting. The beauty is that those providing it have parents who weren't even born in 1954. The sad bit is that folk clubs are not relevant nor desirable for them. It's all small theatre or YouTube. In a pub last week, with about twenty performers ranging in age from 16 to 80, only two of us had ever heard of Mudcat, as we found when we took the piss out of 1954 and had to explain what we were laughing at.