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I don't know, maybe I am at last becoming a grumpy old man, but Clive talking about his
apprenticeship in the folk clubs round Ashton and Stalybridge set me off to
thinking too.

Perhaps if anything good does come out of this "credit crunch" (sounds like a chocolate
bar to me) it might be that we stop buying stuff we never needed anyway, and
stop listening to machine made music, and start going out again into what's
left of the pubs and listening to people as ordinary as ourselves making music
for the sheer joy of it.

That was one of the points Clive made in his interview: that the best music, even in Nashville, happened when people just got together and played together ­for free.

So let's do that - let's all go down the pub and make some music. But don't tell the bank managers with their bodhrans where we're going.

I, by the way, am off out right now to an old Irish pub near the train station where some cracking musicians meet up and where the pool table has an old bicycle leaning against it and the landlord has a broken watch and never calls time.