About time we puss this one to bed, I think

Can I just explain how we worked
We started recording at the beginning of the school summer holidays; one of our colleagues, Denis Turner, was a schoolteacher.
By the end of those holidays, we had a list of potential singers that would take at least a year to get through (even if we found no more) so we stopped and took stock of how we were to proceed
We didn't re-start for eighteen months for various reasons; we had come to the conclusion that if three people (eventually reduced to two) with full time jobs were going to do a proper job we would have to be realistic
Instead of 'head-hunting songs, we decided to attempt to give them a context by talking to the singers at length by spending more time with them
Most of them we got to know personally and some, like Mikeen McCarthy and Mary Delaney, became close friends
We eventually arrived at a situation where, when they were inevitably evicted from their they would phone us to tell us where they were.
We met first met Mikeen MacCathy on the outskirts of West London and last recorded him on the Hackney Marshes, to the extreme East
Eventually, when John Major's Government abandoned their responsibility of providing sites for Travellers, which sent them all scattering to the four winds, we continued to record Mikeen, first in Norfolk and eventually on the outskirts of Bristol, where he died in 2005
We were recording friends - if we hadn't been, we could have got five times the number of songs, but a fraction of the information they gave us
We don't regret having taken the decision we did - almost as good as not voting for Tony Blair!!
Jim Carroll