TeledyN

The law says that a publican can show football on a large-screen television, or have piped music blaring out, but if there is a folk singer or rapper in the pub, there has to be a special licence ... small venues have stopped putting on live music because managements do not want the hassle of filling out lengthy forms.

Just this evening we played in an old community hall in the nearby village of Hepworth. St. Andrews Church Hall spent years boarded up and unused, sad for a grand old structure right at the crossroads, in a town where the prime entertainment outside of intravenous satellite-TV is the lone and always busy foreign conglomerate franchise donut shop of friendly strangers. So why wouldn't a community use such a hall? Where are the dances, the BBQ Turkey Shoots or even neo-Vaudeville concerts like this?

"There's no business model for community events." is one reason, and the reason for tonight's show is to inject a little community donation capital into the fund that might bring the building closer to having a heating system that will appease the 21st Century Building Codes, which are themselves to appease the 21st Century Insurance Adjusters, which are incidentely implicated in the final stake through the community heart, the requirement to have the hall water sent to an expensive and distant government-approved laboratory to ensure the groundwater that everyone else in the neighbourhood also taps is sufficiently low-risk to the Insurer through these taps.

What happened? Where did we go so horribly wrong and how did it get so far out of control? And how do we get it back. Communities around the planet have been having community get-togethers quite fine for some 70,000 years (probably more) and we did so without a business model and without insurance and all the safeguards to minimize 'liability', and now that we're in the spider's trap, we are paying the liability with damages to the community, damages to the social fabric, and damages to our culture.

Where did we go wrong?