Well, that's actually the name of a song by Vin Garbutt, and it was set off by a trip to America, when it seemed to him that every girl ever he saw there seemed to have dental braces, as if the way they were to start with was always assumed to be wrong. And that led into him thinking about other things.

Something that came up in another thread set me thinking about the way that the fear of making mistakes, of being less than perfect and open to ridicule, can paralyse us. And that brought Vin's song to mind, and it seems to me that fear of physical imperfectioin and fear of making mistakes are really aspects of the same thing,

It happens in music all the time - so many people are literally frightened to open their mouths, so that singing and dancing and making music, which are the most natural things in the world, are turned into something where most people assume that their role is always to be spectators.

And that is true of almost everything - sports, speaking up in public, political action... Just try to imagine a world where people just didn't think like that. I think it'd be a far better place in all kinds of ways.

I think that is maybe the key thing about folk music, it challenges that way of thinking. Here's something Martin Carthy wrote: "If you listen to folk music from around the world, you are listening to a distillation over thousands of years involving large numbers of people who from nothing have arrived at some quite astonishig conclusions. Folk music...is people thinking deeply and emotionally and being able to articulate what they feel in music and dance."