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        • Chapter One: 'The Christmas Enigma'
        • Chapter Two: ' The Breakup of Beth's Family''
        • Chapter Three: From Teenager to Adulthood.'
        • Chapter Four: 'The Mills of West Yorkshire.'
        • Chapter Five: 'Harrison Garner Showdown.'
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        • Chapter Seven : 'The ballot for Shop Steward.'
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        • Chapter Eleven: Beth and Dermot start off married life in Galway.
        • Chapter Twelve: The Twin Tragedy of Christmas, 1992.'
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        • Chapter One - ‘Nancy Swales becomes the Widow Swales’
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Song For Today: 22nd January 2021

22/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants. We wish happy birthday to Richard Pang who lives in Singapore: Yvonne Burgess who lives in Adelaide, South Australia, and Mary Parkinson who lives in Keighley, West Yorkshire. Richard, Yvonne, and Mary enjoy your special day.

I sing you two versions of today’s song; one in the genre of jazz, and the other in the style of a ballad. The reason I have done this is to illustrate how one can be happier through choice. My song today is ‘Where or When’. This song originated in the 1937 musical ‘Babes in Arms’ which became the 1939 film version of the same name. The film starred Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

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We often hear the question that commences “Where were you when………..?” Can you remember where you were when President J.F Kennedy was shot in Dallas? Or when you heard the news that Elvis Presley or Marylin Monroe had died, or John Lennon was killed?” Or some other momentous event? Have you ever wondered why or how such details remain with you a lifetime yet, you may still need to refer to a diary to recall the precise date of your son or brother’s birthday, or God forbid, your own wedding anniversary?

In this memory conundrum lies the essence of emotional attachment and the process that leads to being able to remember precise details surrounding a specific event. Have you ever wondered how a person can more easily unburden their most sacred of secrets and the most intimate of personal details to a stranger easier than to a partner, a family member, or even the closest of friends?  The answer lies in the process of ‘emotional distancing‘ and ‘disassociation’. Unburdening with a complete stranger represents an opportunity for the person to ‘emotionally offload’ in a relatively safe way, with less likelihood of any unpleasant comeback.

We remember details best when we associate those details with specific emotions that we feel strongly about. Somebody in old age who has Alzheimer’s can sometimes recollect the details of an event/occasion fifty years earlier in their life when they were very sad/happy/excited/frightened, and yet be unable to recall their daughter’s name or what they ate for breakfast an hour earlier. Having events ‘emotionally associated’ with specific feelings is a sure way to ensure that the mind never forgets them.

If, for example, one date within any month of the year holds a bad experience for you (ie when a loved one tragically died and when you felt so unhappy, so lost, and alone) the best way to get away from the memory of that event is to get away from the ‘associated feelings’ which accompanied that event. We best achieve this by arranging our time differently than that minute/hour/day in a more advantageous way (in a way that produces a positive feeling inside us instead of the original bad feeling). We can do something that is more likely to give us some pleasure. We can be with someone instead of being on our own with nothing but our own sad thoughts to occupy us. That is why a good friend would make a point of doing something nice for you on such a sad anniversary. That is why they would do something which essentially ‘takes you away from yourself’, or ‘takes you out of yourself’ or ‘makes you forget your sad self’ etc., etc. The bottom line is that we do something nice that ‘neutralises’ the original bad feeling which will automatically reoccur in our body at the appointed hour if we just let things happen and do nothing at all.

One contra-indication to the above paragraph is that following the bereavement of a loved one, it is healthy and natural to hurt, to pain, and to feel a sense of loss near to the event. Not to feel bad at such a time is neither natural nor healthy. The closer to the sad event we are, the worse it is, and the more natural and healthier it is ‘to feel bad’. When we do not try to avoid our grief and we process it at the time of the sad event, we get over our sad feelings earlier and seem more able to get on with our lives quicker instead of living in our emotional past. All repression leads to worse emotional consequences, and all emotional expression is invariably healthier for the bereaved individual long term. 

When I met my wife, Sheila, she had been widowed for several years. We got married and continued living in the same house where she had spent the previous years when married to her first husband, Anton. Her first husband died young and she found him in one of the small rooms upstairs before calling an ambulance. Sadly, Anton died shortly after. 

When Sheila and I first got together, although we lived in her house, she wisely allowed me to make it as much mine as was possible.  Sheila was born in England but has a Chinese background. She was born in the Chinese year of the Monkey and I was born in the Chinese year of the Horse.  I knew that the small room upstairs at one side of the house held ‘a sad emotional association for her’, so I renamed the room the ‘Horse Room’ and I filled it with all manner of horse images in the form of paintings, china, bronzes, etc. In short, I gave the room an emotional rebirth by giving it a happy association in the mind of Sheila. When I also die, and Sheila enters that room, hopefully, she will be more likely to think of it as being Bill’s ‘Horse Room’ as opposed to the unhappier associated memory of being ‘the room where I found Anton close to death’. Happier associations with the room immediately neutralised the previous unhappy associations, and even giving the room a name significantly altered emotional dynamics. 
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The room had its ‘negative associated emotions’ initially neutralised with ‘happier associated emotions’, and then, when it was Christened with the title ‘Horse Room’, it instantly stopped being ‘any old room’ and was endowed it with a positive ‘specialness’ identified by its very own name. 

Incidentally, this is an appropriate time to remind the reader that all people feel better when others talking to them use their Christian name in a warm tone. It makes them feel special hearing their name!

Helping exaggerated hurtful emotions to return closer to a healthier position of normality involves the process of us putting two opposites together, to help to distance, defuse, and disassociate. Whenever we want to make ourselves less unhappy, less depressed, less worried, less focussed upon whatever emotionally disturbs us, we do it through the process of ‘emotionally distancing’ our mind and body from the previous unhappy event. We defuse our sad emotions by combining them with happy emotions. We disassociate our emotive self by changing the associative factors of the sad and unhappy event/place/person/ time etc. for happier ones. In short, we can remove an emotionally disturbing event from our memory bank by changing the event and replacing the original hurtful memory with a happier one. Therefore, the healthiest thing any bereaved person can do on the anniversary of a loved one is to ‘focus upon happier times together’. Our memory bank will never forget about sadder associated feelings of the bereaved person, but once you begin to recall happier memories, your mind will not automatically reproduce sad feelings by bringing sad images involuntarily into your focus of thought. We should never forget that it is impossible for the body to think about, feel about or do two opposite things at the same time! This piece of knowledge is the most powerful mental/body/psychological/physiological weapon we possess in our ‘armoury of change’.

The above process shows you ‘how’ to change the effect of any strong emotion, by changing the event in your mind and body, but only you know ‘where’ that event occurred and ‘when’ it occurred to you. The event is part of your life, and while you cannot change the event ever having happened to you, by the process described to you in this post, you can change the unhealthy association and any exaggerated emotional consequences the event precipitated. 

Today, I have sung you two versions of the same song by changing the ‘associated emotions’ of that song. Because I have chosen to sing each version of the same song using ‘opposing aspects’ such as pace, volume, and emotion, it could be said that I have provided you with ‘two different experiences’ and I have subsequently sung you ‘two different songs. One thing I know for certain is that each of you will enjoy one version better than the other (when placed side-by-side).

Love and peace 
Bill xxx 

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Song For Today: 21st January 2021

21/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to Ann Smiley who lives in London, England, and Tawni Maughan who lives in Weatherford, Texas, U.S.A. Ann and Tawni celebrate their birthday today, and we hope that their special day is kind to them.

My song today is ‘That’ll Be the Day’. This song was written by Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison. It was first recorded by ‘Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes’ in 1956 and was re-recorded in 1957 by ‘Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ (his new band). The 1957 recording was certified ‘gold’ (for over a million US sales) by the ‘Recording Industry Association of America’ (RIAA) in 1969. It was inducted into the ‘Grammy Hall of Fame’ in 1998. It was placed in the ‘National Recording Registry’, a list of sound recordings that "are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States", in 2005. Many other versions have been recorded. 

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‘That will be the day’ is merely another way of saying, “Go on! Pull the other leg because I don’t believe a word that you’re saying!”  People have always been prone to believe what they want to believe and disregard any views as being untrue when it is something they do not want to hear. It would be much easier to understand if the ‘gullible people in this world’ came solely from the ranks of the uneducated, and the unintelligent, but sadly that is not the case. As numerous events of the past have proved, there will always be an ear for the ‘conspiracy theorists’ of the day. There will always be people of such radical thought and opinion that were 1000 of the world’s brainiest scientists and best-informed academics to shout the same truth from the top of the Empire State Building to a crowd below, there will always be some in that crowd who are more prepared to receive a lie being placed in their ear providing it resonates with their already preconceived belief than to be told a fact which contradicts and opposes their preconception.

If there is one thing that this past year has taught me, whether one looks across the Atlantic Ocean at the political ‘goings-on’ in the United States of America, or across the Channel at the countries of Europe, or even within our own small island of England, Scotland, and Wales, is that there is nothing as dangerous to maintaining the freedom and democracy of the individual than governing bodies getting drunk on power the more of it they seize from their electorate. There is such a concept as being in power and exercising power over others for power’s sake! 

During the past year, the western world has witnessed different interest groups generally seeking to increase their power base. We have seen the confrontation between the Republican and the Democratic parties in the U.S.A. dividing opinion down the middle and refused to agree upon the American election results, even to the point of insurrection and an uneasy transfer of power from the past President of the U.S.A. to the new President. We have observed the European and British Brexit negotiators trying to secure a Trade Deal while each side blames the other side for intransigence, taking things to the wire before arriving at an uneasy agreement. We have witnessed the ongoing disagreement between the British Government and the SNP (Scottish ruling party) about Scottish Independence, reflecting the desire to revoke ‘The Acts of Union’ of 1706 and 1707 between the English and Scottish Parliaments which turned the independent Kingdoms of England and the Kingdom of Scotland into one United Kingdom known as Great Britain, governed by the same monarch, thereby becoming independent once more. Finally, the world has witnessed a pandemic virus called Covid-19, and how each country has dealt with this threat to its economy and its people's health has created a polarisation of views. In response, every government across the globe has seized to itself greater powers, and has imposed restrictions and severe limitations upon the freedoms of it people, sometimes to the point of suspension of all freedom!

During this most trying of years across the western world, America, Europe, England, Scotland, or the British Government have not emerged with much dignity. Each of these power blocks has sought to exert their influence, fairly or otherwise upon the less powerful whom they govern. At the end of the day, it has been the individual citizen who has been kept ignorant of the facts which the more informed and powerful parts of our ‘democratic processes’ have decided not to tell us. It has been the man and women in the street who has and will continue paying the ultimate price for this gross mismanagement of all leading players on the world stage. 

It is the person of ill-health who has been unable to access our hospitals for vital non-Covid-19 treatment who will pay the cost by their unattended pain, and with their lives! It is the self-employed person who will pay the price of business collapse and bankruptcy! It is the employed man and woman who will lose their gainful employment and the homeowners who will face repossession. It is the people with insufficient income who experience mounting debt who will sink farther down the food chain, while the hungry become hungrier, the homeless become colder and more deprived during winter months, and those lonely people with mental health issues will become more desperate in their depression and may despair so much that they decide to end the life that has been taken from them anyway!

These endless months of opposing consequence will adversely affect every one of us in different measure. Those in the richest bracket who started off their year wealthy will have automatically increased their wealth with each passing month of the country’s economic decline. It is this inhumane side of a capitalist economic system that I have always found most difficult to go along with, and yet I know that communism offers no better economic means of humane management and essential provision. It is as though the individual has only two choices by either selecting to be part of the ‘Capital and Conservative’ or ‘Socialist and Communist’ political and economic systems. In many ways, it is Hobson’s choice we are being given! We can be elect to be ‘unequally happier’ within a capitalistic society or more ‘equally miserable’ within a socialist society. All that we need to decide is whether ‘individual freedom’ trumps ‘collective responsibility’ or vice versa, as having both appear incompatible? 

Whichever political system civilization subscribes to now or in the future, of one thing I am certain; there will be a pyramid power base. There will always be some citizens who are more or less well off than others, and more or less equal in their access to those aspects of one’s existence that makes life more satisfying, happier, and enriched. Such is the nature of mankind who has inexorably grown throughout the centuries to value individual distinction in all matters over that of personal uniformity. It is as though there is a sadistic nature to mankind which makes reward for some possible only at the expense of others being punished! It is as though mankind needs to be able to witness others being less well off than themselves, to feel better in themselves. It is as if I can only be rich if my immediate neighbour is poor, and I can only make myself richer by making my neighbours (both near and far) poorer in the process 

And thirty years from now, although I will not be around to say, “I told you so!” America will still be competing with China and Russia as to who has the biggest and best to boast about, Europe (however large it grows in the number of countries which joins its political and economic block as member states) will still be run by the more influential French and Germans, who have done so for centuries past. I will also predict that the British Government will still be refusing to grant Scotland its Independence and that Boris will be replaced by Rishi Sunak as the Leader of the Conservatives and our future Prime Minister after Great Britain has been fully vaccinated.

As for the power which Prime Minister Boris and the British Government took from the British citizen, during the Covid-19 crisis, and all our freedoms which were restricted, they will all be ribbon wrapped and graciously handed back to the citizen. No way, Buster! That’ll be the day!

The Government of the day (whichever governing party that may be) will not willingly surrender back to you (the electorate) the freedoms which were seized from you during the Covid-19 crisis. The British citizen will be told that though the British Government intended to give you back all the power and freedom it took from you during the Covid-19 pandemic period, and which you have enjoyed ever since Oliver Cromwell beheaded Charles 1 in 1649, that was before the variants Covid-20, Covid-21, Covid-22…… Covid-164 came along out of the blue?

Love and peace. 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 20th January 2021

20/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three birthday ladies. We wish a happy birthday to Eileen Keyes who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. We also wish a happy birthday to Susan Abbott who lives in Bridlington, England, and Pauline Voci who lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Eileen comes from the next-door Irish village to where I was born, and both Susan and Pauline each come from my teenage dancing and romancing grounds of Cleckheaton and Halifax, respectively. Enjoy your special day, ladies, and thank you for being my Facebook friends.

My song today is ‘Fool if You Think It’s Over’. This song was originally written, composed, and sung, and released in 1978 by the British singer-songwriter, Chris Rea. The single's charting success in the USA earned him a Grammy nomination as ‘Best New Artist’ in 1979.

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Too many people foolishly believe a relationship is not over when it patently is, and sadly too many people also believe that a relationship is over when the ‘Decree Absolute’ divorce papers are placed in their hands, and sadly it is not.

The simple truth is nothing should be considered over and done with until (as the saying goes) the fat lady sings! I know that from my own personal experiences, and as too many other people have also discovered to their cost.

Divorce is supposed to end a marital union, just as a wedding is supposed to start one, but was His Royal Highness, Prince Charles, and his second wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and the late Diana, Princess of Wales still part of their three-way relationship, and to indulge in a three-way conversation, I am sure that all three would say that both marriage and divorce rarely live up to expectations whenever experienced by the same person/persons.

Events of any order carry with them emotional consequences that are never erased or can be socially smoothed over. We can all imagine that we are ‘getting on with our lives’ after ending one significant relationship and beginning a new one, but ‘getting on’ with a new relationship while ‘casting off’ an old one is one oxymoron too far. The simple truth is that one’s old relationship and one’s new relationship was, is, and shall always remain a part of one’s life (the same life!) Fool if you think it’s over.

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 19th January 2021

19/1/2021

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I have no Facebook birthdays dedications for my song today, so I dedicate today’s song to Tess who is a most remarkable and very modest woman who lives in the Keighley area with her mother. Have a nice day Tess. From your new friend Bill x 

My song today is ‘Maggie May’. This song was co-written by Rod Stewart. It was released in 1971 and was an immediate Number 1 hit with listeners. 'Maggie May' expresses the ambivalence and contradictory emotions of a schoolboy involved in a relationship with an older woman. Rod described the story told in the song as being a true episode in his earlier life, although he changed the name of the older woman he was involved with to 'Maggie May'.

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It is neither unusual nor unnatural for adolescents and young men or young women to become sexually attracted to the older and more experienced woman or man. It matters not whether they are gay or heterosexual in origin, a boy or girl will often have a crush on their teacher. I recall this as being a natural part of my own development, first as an 11-year-old boy, and later as a young man aged twenty. 

My boyhood attraction did not come in the form of any female teacher at ‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’, Heckmondwike during the 1950s. For that to have happened would have certainly required some miracle.  There was only one male teacher in the school, and that was the headmaster, Mr. Armitage. His sole educational task was to walk around the school all day with a cane in his hand that he would swish loudly in the air to grab the immediate attention of a few boys who had dared to whisper to each other in the corridor. The headmaster never once taught a class, and rarely needed to speak to a pupil. The mere presence of his towering body and the swishing sound of his cane as he passed by was sufficient to command the total respect of ‘every little toe rag in the school’ as he referred to us.

The remaining six schoolteachers had each been heralded into the world fifty years earlier with a smack on the bottom, accompanied by those momentous words of the midwife that no proud mother can ever forget, “It’s a girl!”. However, the midwife would have been more faithful in her description of the species she had just withdrawn from the mother giving birth, had she limited her description to what she had pulled out of the magician’s hat to the single word, “It”. 

When I was a young boy at school, it was common to have read to us stories that frightened the living daylights out of us. It was common to hear mention of wolves killing grannies in their beds and wicked witches and old hags wandering the woods in many of the children’s stories told to us by our teachers. Indeed, come to think of it now, every one of the female teachers who taught at ‘St Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ in my day was well-deserving of bearing her title, ‘Miss’ and their spinster status. Yet, while every ‘Miss’ was considered a child expert, not one had ever been married or given birth to a child, and every one of them easily brought the scary stories about old hags and witches to life with the minimum effort required. In truth, I cannot recall any female teacher in the school with whom ‘pupil infatuation’ would ever become an issue.

I will never forget the first time I entered my children’s ‘First School’ in Mirfield and set eyes upon my son’s female teachers. My first thought was, “Teachers never looked like that in my day!” Had they looked so nice, wild horses would not have dragged me into the mill to work at the age of 15 years! 

I recall attending a social gathering at a club in Mirfield during the 1980s. My present company was a group of chaps who attended the same Catholic Church. As the evening went progressed, more beer was imbibed, and then came the inevitable stories, each one told being taller than the one before it. Regular attendance in the Confessional Box is known to be sufficient social lubricant to liberate the mucky mind and scandalous tongue of many a Roman Catholic who has had one drink too many on a good night out. What made the story told that evening a good one to hear, was that though we considered it to be exaggerated and false, it was a story which fitted some of the early prejudices that we would have liked to be true, just to confirm some of our worse memories of a strict childhood Roman Catholic education.

I have never been a subscriber to conspiracy theories, but on the evening in question, my own prejudices inclined a part of me to accept the truth of the tale as being much stronger than ‘suspicion’ and slightly weaker than ‘fact’, as it came from the ‘horse’s mouth’ so to speak. The person in our social gathering telling the tale was known to have previously served upon the ‘Roman Catholic School Educational Board’ which selected suitable teacher candidates and approved all the teaching posts in the Diocese. That was a fact that made it more difficult for the assembled group to know if we were being informed or deliberately misinformed and being made the butt of a tall tale!                                                                                 

The storyteller stated that the ‘Catholic Education Board’ which appointed all teachers to their schools in the Diocese, rarely employed a woman younger than fifty years of age. All appointed female teachers were spinsters in status and old hags in look. The reason was said to be purely pastoral and pragmatic and concerned with protecting the mind of young boys from sinful thoughts that are prone to go through their heads as they approach the age of adolescence and start having strange feelings down below which require further exploration. According to Roman Catholic scripture, such unnatural thoughts permanently stain the soul of and bring a person one step closer to the fires of hell.

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I was to experience my first infatuation with an older woman of immense beauty when I was 11 years of age. It would be an experience that occurred in the hospital and not at my school. She was a nurse at Batley Hospital called ‘Sister Sykes’. I had been admitted to Batley Hospital in a critical condition after a wagon ran over me and left me at death’s door with several life-threatening injuries. I had a damaged spine, punctured lungs, a collapsed chest with all but two ribs broken, and all my four limbs were broken in many places. For three weeks, the doctors told my parents that they expected me to die, then when I did not, my parents were then informed that my spinal injury would prevent me from ever walking again.

With my condition being so serious and being nearly 12 years old, I was placed as a patient on the Men’s Ward during my nine month’s hospital stay. Because of my age and my extensive injuries, it was not unnatural for the Ward Sister and a few of the other nurses to take an added interest in my progress. However professional ‘professionals’ are supposed to remain, they are only human, and there presumably comes a time when the professional and the more personal interests of even a Ward Sister unknowingly blend. I was never aware of Sister Syke’s personal life, and my infatuation led to my imagination in fanciful flight. All I knew was that Sister Sykes was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. Whenever Sister Sykes ended her day shift, she would always come onto the Veranda (where another three patients had beds as well as me), and she would wish me good night. When Sister Sykes was on night duty, she would always tuck me in. My pain was very intensive with my extensive injuries, and there were many nights when the hurt stopped me from sleeping. On such nights, Sister Sykes would bring me a hot drink whenever she had one herself.

She was the second woman I ever loved; my mother being the first, but in a different way to the way I loved my mum. I remember thinking how unfair life is to make two people who were obviously meant for each other, be born twenty years apart. For nine months, I became determined to kiss Sister Sykes as she tucked me in nightly, and each night, I took fright as she bent down to pull my bedsheet up toward my neck and chickened out. It took me until the very last week of my hospital stay before I managed to drum up the courage to make my move. What surprised me the most was,  as I launched my surprise smackeroo at her cheek, she wasn’t in the least surprised or embarrassed with the innocent advances of this 12-year-old boy. She looked at me affectionately, smiled warmly, and whispered 'Good night'. I did not know it at the time, but I sensed a note of finality in her “Good night, Billy”. That was the very last time I saw her. The night after when she did not show on the ward and I inquired as to her whereabouts, another nurse told me that Sister Sykes had obtained another nursing position at a hospital in Scotland.

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For most boys prone to romancing, 'in the mind' is where infatuation starts and ends, but for some young teenagers, sexual attraction to an older woman can materialises into a real event; if not with the teacher, then with an older woman. I have known a couple of such relationships with a wide disparity of age between the couple, crash and burn immediately after emotional take off. There was one relationship I heard about that outlasted the expectations of the young man’s parents. I did not know either of the two people concerned and heard of the story one evening during the late 1980s while I was attending a weekend course in Clitheroe, Lancashire. 

The relationship in question concerned a young man aged 18 years and a 32-year-old woman who earned a living teaching piano. She did her job out of a love of music as she did not need her job for the money she earned. The woman was reportedly very attractive, well-educated, comfortably off, and unattached. She had been married for a few years before an industrial injury killed her husband, leaving her a widow in her late twenties. She owned a larger than average-sized house with a big garden and extensive grounds. She could not have children; a fact that made her less satisfied as a married woman than she otherwise would have been.

The woman first met the young man in question when he was aged 14 years after he answered an advertisement for ‘gardening help’. She was 28 years old when they first met. He started attending her garden every Saturday morning, and over the following months his visits of once-weekly doubled, when he made a point of attending his gardening duties mid-week also in the summer and autumn months. The young man (who was tall and attractive and looked a few years older than his age) and the young widow gradually grew closer in their affection for each other. Apart from a few kisses, nothing sexual happened was reported to have taken place until the young man was 17 years old.  When it looked like their relationship could get out of hand, the widow asked her young gardener to stop coming. She was stated to be less fearful for her own reputation, or what her gossiping neighbours might say about her, and was more concerned with the young man’s future and good name (for whom she thought a great deal).

The upshot was that the couple genuinely tried to break off the relationship but their emotional and physical attraction toward each other was too strong a bond and proved to be an impenetrable barrier to them ever remaining apart. They did not marry. Even though he wanted to, she had enough foresight to know that a future day would inevitably arrive when their disparity in age would prove too much an impediment to their continued happiness. The woman sold her large house, and the couple lived together in a new part of the country. Their relationship was said to be fruitful, loving, and lasted for a full twenty-years before amicably ending in lifelong friendship; having outlived its natural romantic shelf life. 

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I will never forget one woman with whom I worked when I served as a Probation Officer in Huddersfield. The woman was an attractive lady in her mid-forties, who after divorcing her husband, took on a young lover in his early twenties. When once speaking about her ‘toy-boy’, she told the group she was a member of, 'He's half my ex-husband's age, but twice as energetic. the sex is great, and afterward, he is always so grateful!” From what she told the group, he always bought her a new dress after a satisfactory love-making session. She also told us that whenever she wanted to add to her wardrobe, she would simply initiate a love-making session with her toy-boy, and still manage to get a new dress out of it. 

Come to think of it, I suppose most wives or partners would be perfectly happy to change their twice-a-year love-making sessions into a five nights-a-week-regular-routine if they got a new dress bought the following morning?

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 18th January 2021

18/1/2021

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Having no Facebook friend birthdays to dedicate a song to this morning, I dedicate my song today to all the teenagers who have just experienced a year that no young person should ever be subjected to. The Covid-19 pandemic virus and the government restrictions which have been placed on everyone has been hard, but to the ‘young at heart’ with their whole life before them, it has been harsher than hard. 

Many young people have lost their jobs because of economic lockdown and to entertain the fear they may never get another job for years is unthinkable for any teenager to get their head around at the start of their working life. Even those young people who have managed to retain their manual jobs naturally fear going into an unprotective work environment where social spacing is simply impossible, and safety comes second to securing the owner’s next customer order. Consider the constant angst of young workers (usually on minimum wages) in supermarkets, shops, and other places of work who face hundreds of customers daily, and who do not have the option of working safely from home. Whether it is manual or menial work some young people do, consider the psychological and mental cost they bear every day they travel home on public transport in fear that they might have contracted the virus and will pass it on to another vulnerable family member?

Then, there are the privileged young, the more academic ones in their late teens who look forward to getting time away from the parental abode and being able to spread their wings without parental comment, oversight, and control spoiling their lifestyles. These are the teenagers taking their ‘A’ levels, seeking a good university course that will set them up and shape their future life. The past year has witnessed their disruptive school attendance, hampered their daily learning, seen their examinations cancelled and their university hopes placed on hold. Even the students who managed to finally arrive at the university of their choice, instead of being welcomed by lecturers eager to commence the academic year, they found all their highly-paid educators ’working from home’, by means of zoom lecturers, skype tuitions and the occasional phone call to confirm that they were still alive in their Covid-confined corridors and padlocked university buildings. Instead of experiencing the traditional fun of Fresher’s Week, the only high jinks that new university students were able to get up to was ‘pulling their hair out’ as to why they could have been so foolish to take on a £60,000 university debt, to do what they could have done from the comfort of their own bedroom anyway in the parental abode, besides being well fed by mum in the process!

It mattered not whether the work required from the young was of the manual, menial or academic variety, each young person had to face their own fears and frustrations as they risked contracting Covid-19 and being a carrier of it back home. As to their futures, forget it. They were all forced to take a Covid-19 Gap-Year and could look forward to years of uncertainty ahead.

The young have no lesser love of freedom than do their parents and the more senior citizens in society. Indeed, it could be said that their need for freedom and emancipation at this time in their life is all the greater. This is the most crucial time in their lives, where they will feel with an intensity that only the young have and the old have sadly forgotten. It is a time when much explorative thought is forged in their minds and the most momentous of moments are supposed to happen, from whichever strata of society they were born into and come from.

These are the years when young men and young women should have all the opportunity to travel to and explore new countries and try out new things. These years should be times of self-discovery when they hopefully find out what it is that they want to do with their lives over the immediate years ahead. These are the years they learn a lot about life and love, about absence and abandonment, and about happiness and sadness; all essential lessons for the romantic heart who so far has witnessed too many cold seasons and not enough springs. These are the years when they learn about the heights of happiness and the pit of despair, and emote with an intensity of feeling that only the young heart can manage. It is the time when hearts take flight in a moment of fancy, and can come crashing back down to earth, and are capable of being broken in a matter of moments. It is a time when first love is found and lost within a beat of the heart, and first blood is spilled by many a fair maiden during a moment of heated passion. 

One’s teenage years should be a time to treasure, a time to remember, a time to make mistakes and make amends. It is a time to live and a time to love. It was never meant to be a time for boyfriend and girlfriend to be kept apart in Lockdown.

And when this current time of uncertainty, depression, desperation, death, and fear has passed over, will the young, will we, will any of us be the same people ever again. There has been an economic cost of this pandemic which is of unimaginable proportion; and although it will be the country of today that will pick up the tab, it will be the youth of ten thousand tomorrows from now who will still be paying off the debt! For the first time in centuries, nostalgia will hold significant meaning for the young of the future.

My song today is ‘Young Hearts Run Free’. This disco song was written by David Crawford and originally recorded by American soul singer, Candi Staton in 1976. The record reached the Number 1 spot on the ‘Hot Soul Singles Chart’. It also peaked at number twenty on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ singles chart. 

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There is nothing like the heart of a young person feeling love for another to shake their sensibilities to the core and rock their world. Young feelings have a rawness about them which hurts deeply when the heart is first wounded, and pride falls foul to unrealistic expectations of finding true love the first time around the block.

There is something about the innocence and greenness of youth that makes all things felt by them more intense they were ever meant to be. Young people can be happier than adults, sadder, more content, and more disappointed than adults. Whatever level of pleasure or pain that adults experience, young people can equally match with bucket loads to spare. It is as though their innocence makes them more vulnerable to the pitfalls of humanity. One needs to have lived more years to acquire a streetwiseness that can tell the difference between devilment and sheer wickedness. Only the experience born with age can accurately gauge the distinction between possibility and likelihood.  

When a young person gives their heart for the very first time, it is done with the sacredness and solemness of it being the only time. For them, there is no other person in the world to love other than the person they now feel love for. To them, one moment and a lifetime is indistinguishable when they are in each other’s arms, and when they are apart, time remains as constant. 

How many occasions have wise parents asked their impetuous teenage children to wait a few years before they get engaged or seek to marry the young man or woman they profess to love and want to spend the rest of their lives with? How many times have concerned, and loving parents advised their children to get a good degree behind them and to get a good job before they seriously think about getting married and being able to support a family? How often has a mother who is only wanting the best for her daughter advised her to remain a virgin until her wedding night, or at least to go on the pill if she is unable to abstain from sex outside marriage and before she is ready to parent a child? And how likely is the young person willing to comply with parental advice, especially when their hearts and hormones run away with them beneath the moonlight one romantic night as they face the very same teenage temptations that sexually taunted mum and dad during their courting youth many years earlier. How can teenagers not understand why it is their parents do? 

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Just as the Jesuits would boast, “Give me the boy until he is seven and I’ll give you the man”, so I believe the seeds of youthful folly are sown. When I was 8 years old, I fell in love with Winifred Healey. Winifred was slightly taller than I was and seemed more mature. She was three months older than me, but she knew how to kiss without being bashful in the process. One morning during our school break, we agreed to ‘go with each other’. The term ‘going with someone’ did not signify that either of you went anywhere together. What ‘going with someone ‘meant was that ‘nobody else did’.  It meant you were a couple, and every other boy or girl in the school recognised that you were ‘spoken for’.  Once made, such a sacred declaration between boy and girl became tantamount to being no less than an adult engagement to marry when you were 21 years old. Meanwhile, their school friends would acknowledge the solemn pledge by keeping their grubby, sticky-toffee hands off either of the betrothed classmates.

Wanting to properly seal our engagement and love of each other in style, I did the only honourable thing a penniless 8-year-old boy from ma poor family could do; I stole a diamond engagement ring from my best friend’s older sister to give to my betrothed the very next morning at school.  During the morning break when the free milk was being handed out, I gave Winifred her engagement ring. She was over the moon and instantly showed the sparkler off to all her school friends. Before class was out that day, the local policeman was hot on my tail, having heard on the educational grapevine about the 8-year-old Heckmondwike schoolgirl showing off a two-carat diamond ring to all and sundry. 

Needless to indicate, that was the end of my first romance. Within one minute of being interviewed by the investigating police constable, and without even having been threatened by torture, Winifred Healey ‘gave me up’. We had only been ‘going with each other’ one day, and it soon became clear to me that we hadn’t gone anywhere yet and never would if she threw in the towel that easy. 

Before she was 16 years old, Winifred Healey promised to ‘go with someone else’. Within six months of leaving ‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ in Heckmondwike, Winifred entered the convent to become a nun after she had given her heart to another. It seemed that I never had a chance of winning Winifred’s heart. I had always been an odds-on-winner to lose Winifred’s hand to another. I had effectively been left at the starting gate of ‘The Winifred Healey Stakes’, to be declared a non-runner. I would be approaching 18 years of age when I next decided to jump back in the saddle.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 17th January 2021

17/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to two birthday celebrants, neither of whom I know in which part of the world they live. One is Eddie Walsh (who sounds Irish by name) and the other is Warren Harvey Ackroyd who once lived in Kingston, Jamaica, I believe? Wherever you are both hanging out today, Eddie and Warren, we hope that you enjoy your special day.

My song today is ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’. This 1954 blues song was written by Willie Dixon and was first recorded by Muddy Waters. It was initially released as ‘Just Make Love to Me’. The song reached number four on Billboard’s magazine's ‘R&B Best Seller’s Chart’. In 1961, Etta James recorded the song for her debut album ‘At Last’.

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Was any teenager to ask equal numbers of men and women, “How do I make love?” I am reasonably sure that he would receive widely different answers from both sexes, and that there would be little marrying of the male and female minds. To most men, ‘making love’ and ‘having sex’ is one and the same thing, and is part and parcel of the same act, but to every woman who ever lived and loved, it means much more.

Please let me acknowledge from the outset (contrary to popular belief) that when it comes to providing first-rate service in ‘the restaurant of romance’, I have dropped and broken as many plates as the clumsiest of waiters wanting to impress his table guest. Like any testosterone-charged bull in a china shop, I would have as many crashes as I did crushes. While I never promised more than I could deliver to any young woman, it did not stop a few of them from promising everything to me and essentially delivering nothing. 

I first set off on my teenage crusade of winning over all the hearts in Christendom (Halifax, Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike, and Dewsbury) when I was around 17 years old. This was my stage of life when I felt at my most attractive to the opposite sex. I could sing, dance, and fight as well as any young man from Windybank Estate, and when possessed by a James Dean lookalike, this trinity of personal abilities was good enough to gain me easy access to the hearts of most young women in my realm of romantic conquest. I had been a romantic combatant on the battlefield for several years before my dear late mother gave me the best piece of advice ever regarding the opposite sex. 

While always having been blessed in the good-looks department, my confidence plus any additional positive traits in my personal wardrobe of attraction made me popular with both my mates and the young women. For some reason other than these attributes, however, I always seemed to finish up with the most beautiful young woman at the end of the night, while other mates (who were as handsome as me) usually fared far worse with the attractiveness of their ‘last-dance-of-the-night’ partner. While we have moved on sixty years into a different century since my teenage years, I am sure that the choice of partner for the ‘last dance’ still carries the same message to the dancing pair? 

What was this piece of motherly advice which advanced my amorous intentions better than any other she ever gave me I hear you ask eagerly? My mother smiled and said, “Billy, if you don’t ask, you never get!” I always wanted to dance with and date the most attractive of young women, and following my mother’s advice, I would always ask the most beautiful one I laid eyes on to dance. I must confess, I carried enough confidence and positive expectation which never led to surprise when the beautiful young women smiled obligingly and took the floor with me. As far as I was concerned, ‘this was the way it was meant to be’.

One Saturday night at the dance in Cleckheaton Town Hall, a group of us approached half a dozen young women standing together at the side of the dance hall floor as they secretly eyed-up the male talent looking in their direction. The group of mates I was with eventually gathered the courage to ask the bunch of young women to dance, and before I realised it, they were in the process of approaching their female prey halfway across the dance floor. I was being left behind and started fearing that I would find myself being landed with the ‘booby prize’ in the female draw by the time I caught up with them. Strange though it may seem, by the time I arrived to ask the remaining girl in the group to dance, I could not believe my eyes! Every girl in the group had been asked to dance by my mates except ‘the most gorgeous girl in the lot!’ I could not figure out why I had been left with the best of the bunch. While I knew that I was popular with my mates, none of them liked me enough to leave a succulent peach in the fruit bowl while they took the plainer apples and less succulent bananas as a preferred taste.

Later that night, my attractive date told me that it was not the easiest of social lives being the most attractive-looking girl in her crowd of peers. When asked to explain, she started to point out the obvious, saying that most young men never ask her to dance because they feared she would probably refuse their advances; thereby leaving them to make the ‘walk of shame’ back to their jeering mates shouting ‘loser’ at the poor chap whose offer to dance with the beautiful lady had been so publicly declined. Also, she pointed out that because most young men wanted to get ‘as much as they could’ from their association with women (even on the first night), they often made several crude assumptions as to which young women they would be better ‘getting off with’ as they approached a group of females awaiting dancing partners. At long last, I knew what my mother had been trying to tell me!

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While I am no expert in the field of ‘lovemaking’, I have learned my most important lessons in life from my greatest mistakes made. I learned early on in my romantic life that women’s needs are rarely the same as men’s desires, and even when they are, they rarely occur at the same time. I would learn that ‘lust’ and ‘love’ can be the closest of bed partners as well as being the most emotionally distant. My own love lessons evolved through the process of trial and error assisted in large measure through my early attraction, association, and intimacy in my late teenage years with more mature and available women. In later life, while I also had my experience and work as a marriage guidance counsellor, and a Probation Officer to reinforce such knowledge, I would also have to say that being one of two people in a failing marriage that ends in an acrimonious divorce teaches one a lesson about intimacy and sexual dissatisfaction not learned elsewhere. 

The most important thing I would learn in love and life was that to a woman, sexual intimacy is as much (if not more) a means to get emotionally close to her partner than being just a means of acquiring physical pleasure. I learned that whereas men require a degree of physical intimacy to have their male egos stroked, their sexual appetite satisfied, and their manhood validated, that women required and valued emotional support more than man could ever imagine. Without the vein of emotion running through every rock of romance given to them, every woman will know that what she holds in her hands will never amount to being more than ‘fool’s gold’. While women value compliments more than men, they need to hear the truth delivered with verbal care and sensitive selection, that were their male counterparts called Pinocchio they would be faced with too many long noses.

I have spent a lifetime ‘falling in love’, combined with a few long periods of ‘being in love’. My small understanding of a woman’s mind leads me to the conclusion that sexual intimacy is never a destination, but a path that can lead to emotional bondage and mental union with a soulmate. It is perhaps the most ironic of all ironies, but until a man stops having sex with the woman in his life, he will not discover how to make love with her. 

One of my greatest assets in the weapons of my romantic armoury was my willingness to make myself emotionally expressive and emotionally vulnerable. When one likes oneself, it becomes so much easier and less threatening to be ‘found out’. Indeed, I now know that honesty and vulnerability cannot be separated. I also know that any man who is prepared to make themselves emotionally vulnerable to any woman automatically will be less of a threat to them, even the strongest of female personalities. Any man who is not afraid to cry when emotionally moved by a sad/happy film while sitting alongside his woman will learn more quickly than most males, that there is more than one obvious use for having a box of tissues to hand. 

I will end today’s post with the observations of the Jewish female comedienne, Joan Rivers, who blamed her mother for the inevitable dissatisfaction in her marital sex life. Joan said, “All she told me was 
that the man goes on top and the woman underneath.' Joan went on to explain, “For three years we would go to bed at the same time nightly, and we always slept in the same bedroom, even if we had shared a few discourteous words during our day. For the first three years of our marriage, I religiously followed mum’s advice and nothing exciting ever happened. Within ten minutes, we would both be fast asleep in our bunk beds.”

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 16th January 2021

16/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to two birthday celebrants, neither of whom I know in which part of the world they live. One is Eddie Walsh (who sounds Irish by name) and the other is Warren Harvey Ackroyd who once lived in Kingston, Jamaica, I believe? Wherever you are both hanging out today, Eddie and Warren, we hope that you enjoy your special day.

I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants today. We wish happy birthday to Liam Walsh who comes from the Irish village of my birth in Portlaw, Waterford, and Johnathan Jets Deady who also lives in Waterford, Ireland. We also wish a happy birthday to Miriam Abboud who lives in Lancaster, Texas, in the U.S.A.  Enjoy your special day, Liam, Johnathan, and Miriam.
My song today is ‘No Matter What’. This song was recorded by British singer-songwriter Calum Scott for the special edition of his debut studio album, ‘Only Human’. It was released on 19 October 2018. It is a song about a ‘Gay man’ coming out to his parents and being accepted for who he is. When he tells his mother, she says:
 “I love you no matter what. I want you to be happy son, and I just want you to be who you are. She wrapped her arms around me, and said don’t try to be what you’re not, I love you no matter what.”

Scott describes ‘No Matter What’ as his "most personal song" and the song he is "most proud of". The song tells the story of Scott telling his parents he was gay and their reactions of loving him ‘no matter what’. Scott said "It was a song that I always had to write and a song I never thought I'd be able to share. This song has so many bones behind it and has such a wider discussion, not only about sexuality but about acceptance." He added, "This hopefully will be a movement. I want to help people, I want to inspire people, I want to make people more compassionate”.

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The three cruelest forms of discrimination I have ever witnessed in my 78 years of life have been against women, people of non-white skin, and homosexuals. I accept that there are many more areas of discrimination practiced in society today, but none have ever been as vociferously expressed.

I acknowledge up front that though I have never ‘knowingly’ discriminated in thought, word, or deed against women or people of dark skin and have spent over fifty years actively agitating for their equal rights in all things on their behalf when it comes to the ‘Gay’ person, my conversion came much later in my life. The reason for this later learning was because the nature of my prejudice ran much deeper. Indeed, the very core of my cancer against this perceived imperfect replica of man resided in the heart of my own masculine identity and a degree of masculine insecurity I must have held. Today, I want to address you on how I managed to rid my heart and head of this ingrained bias and discrimination against men who I found difficult to call ‘men’, and whom I saw as being masculine mutations of Adam who seemed happy to indulge in all manner of sexual deviances that came naturally to their ‘unnatural character’.

Before 1967, the Law of the land, the Church of the State, and all other Churches, and Society, in general, were unified in their abhorrence of the homosexual act. Indeed, the very fact that women were never perceived as having the same sexual deviances as their Gay counterparts is indicative of which specific part of the homosexual act between two men generated the most disgust in heterosexuals.

The 1967 Sexual Offences Act in England and Wales legalised homosexual acts on the condition that they were consensual, in private and between two men who had attained the age of 21, and yet another thirty years would pass before telling another that someone was ‘Gay’ would result in the common response of “So what?”

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We all discriminate to some measure; it is only human. It is an inevitable part of every individual’s behaviour pattern and value system to discriminate in favour of this and against that. Indeed, without the ability to discriminate, one could not have the avenue of being able to create a value system of any description.

None of the above, however natural, does not make our discriminations fair and proper to display or enact. As creatures whose behaviour and response patterns are largely a result of the experiences and conditioning processes of our development, how our parents and guardians seek to nurture us is not necessarily our nature to automatically adopt. For example, although I consider myself a person who today chooses to live my life as a Christian, I believe that had my parents been of the Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist belief when I was born, in all probability I  would have been inducted (some might argue ‘indoctrinated’) into their religion, and I would still adopt a similar belief today as a 78-year-old man, whatever freedom of thought I imagine myself to possess.

Prejudice can be generally described as being a preconceived judgment or opinion. Such is an adverse opinion or leaning is formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge is known to substantiate its presence. Prejudices display an irrational attitude of hostility that is directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics. Initially, the prejudices within society may have been religious, political, or ones of social class, but over the years they have been greatly added to include those prejudices of gender, disability, sexuality, skin tone, race, culture, etc., etc.

I was born in 1942 and was brought up during the 1950s and 1960s. I was born in Ireland into a family of Roman Catholic persuasion, and at a time when the parish priest ruled supreme in the country village.  My parents and their first three of seven children migrated to West Yorkshire during our first five years of life. Being both Catholic and of Irish descent were two common prejudices we experienced from the start of our lives in West Yorkshire. We may have been accepted as decent human beings by some English neighbours but during our earlier years living on a newly-built council estate, we were rarely welcomed.  Some of the worse insults and jibes our family faced were being called Irish tinkers on English land, living in a new property, stealing English jobs, lowering worker’s wages, and jumping to the front of the housing queue just because we had larger families to support. Does any of this sound familiar today in 2021?

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England in the 1950s and early 1960s was a very racist country and landlords often placed notices in their windows with bold lettering proclaiming ‘No Blacks. No Irish, No Dogs!’ Non-white citizens were discriminated against in the workforce, in housing, and in all manner of accommodation. Black migrants fared worse of all within any institutional bodies, associations, clubs, or unions, and were denied admission to and acceptance by a British, white, polite society. 

Largely because my own life had been saved by the skill of a West African surgeon at the age of 11 years as I lay in the hospital close to death with multiple and critical injuries, my perception of and attitude to non-white citizens was much different from that of the next white person in the bus queue. I automatically held positive feelings towards the black person and West Africans in particular.

Before I had even left my teenage years behind, I became an active advocate for the rights of the non- white person in a country where racism ran rife, and the only protest march I have ever been on was to free Nelson Mandela after his initial imprisonment, and before he became a household name.  Because of my positive childhood experience in Batley Hospital with a West African surgeon who saved my life against the odds, I naturally felt closer to the dark-skinned person than most of my white-skinned neighbours. Indeed, as the youngest trade union shop steward in Great Britain at the age of 18 years, fate afforded me the ideal opportunity to stand up for what I believed in instead of just wearing the badge behind my coat lapel.

The textile firm I worked at in Liversedge refused to hire a West Indian applicant to fill a job vacancy on the sole grounds that he was ' a man with black skin’, so I brought 400 mill workers out on strike. It was a ‘cause célèbre’ at the time and received national press coverage. We stayed out on strike until the mill owner eventually backed down, by which time the West Indian decided not to take up the job. Being the youngest textile shop steward in Great Britain at the time, along with being able to persuade 400 white workers in a race-rife country to strike on the principle of employing a black worker, secured me enough press publicity to bring my ‘powers of persuasiveness’ to the attention of the higher echelons within the textile trade union. I was offered funded sponsorship to obtain a degree at ‘Ruskin College’, but because I had set my mind on travelling in America when I was 21 years of age, I graciously declined. Despite this refusal of mine, however, I became a lifelong anti-racist protester and have forever remained committed to that cause.

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As regarding my discrimination of women, along with the whole of the male world, man has discriminated unfairly against women ever since time began. While much progress has occurred in most areas of equal opportunities, there is still a long way to go. It took a century for women to ‘get the vote’, another half-century for them to ‘get the pill’ another fifty years to ‘get closer to breaking through the glass ceiling’ of all previous positions blocked to them in Church, State, Business and Society, because they were women! I grew up at a time where the world was still regarded as being man-made, and the little woman’s prime roles in the home involved ‘making love’, ‘making up the fire’ on a cold morning, and ‘making the meals’ for the man of the house. These being her main roles, she would be allowed to consider herself as being the mistress of the home, and her prime responsibility would take place in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the lounge/dining room. These prime roles would naturally be accomplished between given birth to the required number of children desired by the master of the house to carry on the family name. 

Over the last fifty years, I have worked to stand up for ‘Women’s Rights’ wherever I could. Between 1990 and 2002, I held over two thousand (2000) storytelling assemblies in Yorkshire schools (mostly Primary Schools). I would visit different Yorkshire schools every morning and most afternoons for over twelve years as a budding children’s author. During all my school visits, it became evident that girls were still getting a poorer service from their class teachers than boys. Boys would make more noise, more trouble, and demand much more teacher attention, which they invariably received. Even in their careers which they could look forward to when they left schools, it was the boys who would be educationally guided toward being wagon drivers, plumbers, doctors, surgeons, pilots, priests, bishops, politicians, and parliamentarians, while girls (while they wait for Mr. Right to marry them) could perhaps aspire to be typists and office workers, hairdressers, canteen cooks, nurses, cleaners, and the biggest job of all; mothers-waiting-in-the-wing for Mr. Right to come along and marry them.

The late Catherine Cookson and her husband, Tom, who had been friends of mine for many years, helped me address this sexual inequality between girls and boys in primary schools. They paid for the first limited-edition publication of the ‘Action Annie Omnibus’, which are twelve seasonal stories about a young ‘tom-boy’ girl who never gives up trying and is as good as any boy in anything she undertakes. ‘Action Annie’ is not the type of girl to wait about for things to happen or to get better. She gives life a helping hand along the way. ‘Action Annie’ can do whatever any boy can, with bells on. Since that first publication of ‘Action Annie Omnibus,’ the book is in constant publication and is available from amazon.com, with all book sale profits going to a charitable source.

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My hardest prejudice, which it took me many years to overcome and positively address was the common prejudice that 1960 Great Britain had against homosexuals. Even after the ‘1967 Sexual Offences Act’ that legalised homosexual acts in England and Wales, on the condition that they were consensual, in private and between two men who had attained the age of 21, I still found the notion of two men being sexually involved with each other as offensive to my sensibilities and as repulsive to my macho view of ideal maleness as was humanly possible.

It took me far too long to even face and confront my homosexual prejudices, and almost as long a time before I would even accept the undeniable presence of this prejudice. I had my strong religious views to contend with, and a life of heterosexual conditioning which instinctively informed me that homosexuality was at best a deviant and unnatural sexual practice between two men that was rightfully criminalised. At worse, I held a deep revulsion at the mere thought of one man placing his penis in the orifice of another man, making a connection for which it was never designed to couple. It also seemed the ‘queerest’ of all things to sensually kiss a person of the same sex, besides being wholly ‘unnatural’ to be turned on by such actions!

These thoughts disturbed my mind and initially made me feel uncomfortable in the presence of any homosexual man. Looking back, I can now honestly say that being more prepared to brand such behaviour as being a deviant and disgusting practice performed by ‘perverts’ and probable ‘child molesters’ seemed to have the effect of positively reaffirming my own sexuality in every respect as being ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’ more than sensing my own deeper prejudices at play.

I now find it ironic that the very term being “a man’s man” was a macho heterosexual term that was regularly trotted out by John Wayne types as being a badge of toughness. I am not sure of what precise image being called “a man’s man” would drum up today? 

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In 1970, I became a Probation Officer in Huddersfield; a job I performed for over 27 years. At a time, when most new Probation Officers leaving their training courses, their colleges, and their universities were followers of working theories propounded by such eminent people as Jung, Rogers, and Freud, etc, in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, there were few brave enough to become a follower of ‘Behaviour Modification’. Not me, however. I was always more pragmatic in my approach whenever it came to helping people. While I did not consider it to be irrelevant ‘why’ a person did this or that wrong, or ‘how’ they came to behave thus (their motive behind an act), I also knew that even if one could discover such insightful knowledge, the knowledge alone would not change the unsatisfactory situation, and the person would still not have changed their bad or harmful behaviour in the meantime.

It was the desire to be able to change people’s bad response patterns before needing to know why and how such behaviour developed and formed which made me consider ‘Behaviourism’ as being the most effective working practice of bringing about positive changes in the life of an offender. At the time, there was no other Probation Officer in West Yorkshire of any rank who practiced ‘Behaviour Modification’, and very few Probation Officers in the country were into ‘Behaviourism’. The reasons were numerous, but to many British workers, ‘Behaviour Modification’ was an American working method that had been largely discredited following the adverse publicity it had received having previously endorsed electro-convulsive treatments (aversion therapy) as being an acceptable form of treatment and work practice. During its earlier period, ‘Behaviour Modification’ got itself ‘a deservedly bad name’ after it tried to change many types of behaviour by the combined use of electric shock treatment allied to deviant visual imagery or unwanted behaviours. Among such inappropriate use, was the initial ‘Behaviourist’ belief that homosexuality was a deviant form of behaviour that had been ‘learned’ and could therefore experience being ‘unlearned’ and ‘reconditioned’ back to more ‘natural ways’.

This was one of the most shameful, the darkest, and worse side of ‘Behaviour Modification’ which made most workers shy away from its practice as being an ethical method of working. But there was so much good within the ‘Behaviour Modification’ model for my inquiring mind to ignore; so much common sense I was not prepared to discard. After all, I had been a Roman Catholic all my life, and even though there were things about Roman Catholic belief and practice I did not accept as being ‘Gospel’ where truth was concerned or indeed ‘Christian’ in attitude in some instances, I never once seriously considered leaving the faith and following another. Why then should I react any differently?I would remain  a ‘Behaviourist’?

I am so pleased that I stayed within the flock of ‘Behaviourism’ to witness the discipline discard its more discriminatory views, along with any disreputable and previous dangerous method such as its support for Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT). Within a matter of five years after becoming a Probation Officer, ‘Behaviour Modification’ had witnessed a fundamental restructuring of its methods in America and across the western world. It had radically cleaned up its act.

The discredited views upon homosexuality which had been propounded by Behaviourist of the past were abandoned, and the mind became as important in the working processes of bodily response change as did the individual’s body and muscular responses. Gradually, what was once known as ‘Behaviour Modification’ became known as ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’. After the Behaviourist had abandoned their disreputable beliefs about homosexual behaviour being ‘changeable’, it began looking for reasons to support the new theory that being ‘Gay’ was not a learned behaviour, therefore it could not be ‘unlearned’ and was a state of nature as opposed to nurture.

‘Behaviour Modification’ graduated into becoming ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’ and has been accepted as being one of the most ethical, effective, and morally practiced of all current working methods of psychological, psychiatric, probation, and social work bodies. ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’ was much more than a change in name. This was a change in working emphasis which corresponded with the recognition that homosexuals are born that way because of their ‘nature’ and not because of their ‘nurture’. No longer was Gays perceived ‘unnatural’, and it was accepted that there was no ‘moral justification’ in seeking to change their homosexual behaviour.

And so, my long-held prejudice against the gay man or woman became instantly redundant in my value structure, not because of some religious, societal, or moral conversion but because of scientific and medical academic fact! My one-time revulsion that had previously put a nasty taste in my mouth to match the nasty thought inside my head and the uncharitable feeling inside my heart had also gone, enabling me to change my words of describing a homosexual person in orientation to that of being ‘gay’.  

Even refusing to use the term ‘gay’ instead of ‘homosexual’ for many years was merely one more way of personally maintaining my old prejudice longer than was necessary. I will not pretend that every negative thought or feeling or image that I associate with being homosexual today has been eradicated from my mind, because I feel sure it has not, any more or less than centuries of negative conditioning of blackness in a white man’s world, along with a more negative concept of womanhood in a man-made-world.

What I also learned over the years since I first believed in the efficacy of changing inappropriate behaviour, is that any present-day ‘cognitive behaviour therapist’ (C.B.T. worker) has no moral justification in seeking to change the behaviour of any other person, unless they are first willing and desirous of changing their own inappropriate behaviour. I have also learned that behaviour which was established over many years cannot be changed overnight and that the stronger the initial prejudice was, the greater the amount of positive effort is required, and the longer the length of time is needed to change it for the better. It is unrealistic to think otherwise, and some might even consider it dumb to believe that the social conditioning of the behaviour of any nation over many centuries is likely to be ever fully changed for the better in a few decades.

What I do know is that many of my good friends today are non-white, gay, female, English, and Protestant. Why a few are even Cliff Richard fans and love Marmite.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 15th January 2021

15/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to my five birthday celebrants. I wish a happy birthday to my nephew, David Forde. David has been battling his own demons over the past couple of years and winning. Well done David. We are all proud of you. We also wish a happy birthday to Chuck Braxton who lives in Nashville, Indiana: Frank Towers from Oxenhope, West Yorkshire: Besi Shurdhaj who lives in Kosovo, and Teighan Quinlan who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary in Ireland. Enjoy your special day, David, Chuck, Besi, and Teighan. 

My song today is ‘The Road to Hell’ which Chris Rea recorded and released in an album of the same name in October 1989. I have posted this song before, but there have been so many private requests for me to repeat it, that I do so today, especially as it is somewhat appropriate to the time of the country’s lockdown.

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From everything I have experienced over the past year, Covid-19 reminds me more than anything else of Chris Rea’s recorded song, 'The Road to Hell'. Our lives have been turned upside during the past year of 2020, and although we are not out of the woods yet,  rays of sunlight can be glimpsed through the trees providing our country with the more hopeful prospect of having three approved vaccines to beat this Covid-19 pernicious virus which has wreaked so much fear, ill-health, death, economic collapse, job loss, and all manner of social disruption since its commencement one year ago.  

Good behaviourists offer both the carrot and stick when seeking to modify human behaviour, and that was essentially the essence of the Government’s pre-Christmas 2020 official message. We were told that while it was permissible for families to meet up beneath the same roof during Christmas week 2020, it was not advisable that they did so unless they were prepared to pay the possible penalty of burying a loved one in the New Year. Put bluntly, it sounded very much like ‘Give granny or granddad a Christmas hug, if you must, but be prepared to bury them before the spring of 2021’. 

Unfortunately, it looks as though this has come to pass in some measure as the daily death rate in the last two days (ascribed as Covid-19 deaths) was almost 1400 people each day. Bear in mind that all current daily released figures reflect people who were positively tested with Covid-19 three weeks ago.

Having promised the nation a Christmas window of five full days in December 2020, the Government effectively placed itself in a double bind. It found itself falling down a deep political hole it had dug, and from which there seemed to be no way out with any honour as the Christmas week approached and a national surge in the increase of Covid-19 started to fill up NHS beds. Whatever one’s political colours, the Government could not do right for doing wrong. On one side, Prime Minister, Boris, could have played Scrooge, and completely shut down Christmas 2020. Had he dared to have changed his mind again, after initially ignoring the medical and scientific advice to cancel Christmas the first time around, he would have most certainly have abandoned all hope of ever entering Christmas 2021 as the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Instead, Boris decided to wear the Emperor’s clothes as he boldly marched ahead on the road he had previously mapped out, however high the New Year cost.

Recognising that he had never been as unpopular in the poll of ‘political leaders’ since he first assumed the Office of Prime Minister of Great Britain on 24 July 2019, Boris preferred to take up the cudgels of being the saviour of Christmas as opposed to the Scrooge who had sabotaged it. So, as ‘Leader of the Band’, he decided to lead a large proportion of the British electorate down the most popular road they seemed determined to travel during Christmas anyway, whatever direction the Government secretly preferred. Having allowed the bulk of the population to call the Christmas tune, Boris had no other alternative but to keep in step with his electorate and play from the same hymn sheet. He proudly played the premier role of Pied Piper, as he led his followers, ‘The British Lemming Party’ towards a mass suicidal Christmas cliff edge! 

As he plodded on, Boris kept receiving scientific warnings about what inevitably lay ahead, unless he changed course. After giving the flashing red-light signals a second thought, and with both arms being twisted behind his back by opposing Conservative strategists, economists, scientific advisors, and medical officers, Boris did what Boris does best; he changed his mind again at the eleventh hour, after ten million ten-kilo fresh-family turkeys had been ordered.

Like the former quizmaster of television’s ‘University Challenge’(Bamber Gascoigne) Boris had started, so he decided he’d finish! Having promised that Christmas would not be cancelled, he allowed Christmas Day to go ahead, making sure that every Christmas traditionalist in the land would not be able to brand him a party pooper. But Boris does not wear a blonde bird’s nest on top of his head for nothing, if not to conceal from the electorate what plan he is hatching beneath. Only Boris knows how to have ‘an oven-ready deal’ that never needs cooking! 

So, in his traditional flamboyant style (a cross between Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh) Boris issued his Christmas-cracker instructions, along with a free plate of the best mince pies from Waitrose, and a hot glass of punch to wash it down for every family in the land. The Christmas message coming from Number 10 could not have been clearer. Boris was telling us all, “Merry Christmas everyone. Eat, drink and be merry, but don’t blame me if you throw up afterwards! “He must be the only host ever who sent our invitations for a Christmas party, at which there was no fun to be had and the guests left with no ‘goody bags’. Beneath the Prime Minister’s Christmas message of good cheer lay the obligatory political ‘get out clause’ when things inevitably went wrong in the New Year.  Taken at face value, one might be forgiven for having thought that Boris had wished us all a Merry Christmas, but beneath the surface reverberated the subliminal message of the grim reaper: “You can give granny and granddad a hug for Christmas but be prepared to attend their funeral early in the New Year!” 

For many who were unprepared to change or modify their Christmas plans regarding having family visitors to their homes and ‘bursting all bubbles’ to meet up with a few friends over the Christmas period, unfortunately, a cliff-edge disaster proved unavoidable. Don’t get me wrong, as my comments are in no way politically coloured. I genuinely believe that whichever complexion of government took the country through 2020 (in any country in the world) they would have probably erred at every turn and could not do right for doing wrong in the eyes of half its populace.

I am equally as sure that whichever road the government chooses to take us down during the first six months of 2021, there will be signposts missed, opportunities squandered, wrong turnings made; and yet, I truly believe it will prove more hopeful a road to travel than last year was. The NHS is currently as close to collapse as it can possibly get without going under. It has increased bed occupation greater than it has ever been, and at the very same time, it is having to cope with an ever-increasing workload with fewer required staff to service patient needs as its nurses and doctors also succumb to illness, extreme fatigue and inevitable burn out. I would ask all Covid-19 deniers to be in no doubt that there is a neck-and-neck race between the virus and the vaccine reaching the whole population first. Let us hope that we get to the 18th hole first and are in the clubhouse celebrating with a well-earned glass of our favourite tipple as Covid-19 finds itself mired in a bunker and unable to progress.

Meanwhile, as the country heads towards the green of spring, with all the mixed confidence and doubt of a single-club golfer, let us hope that we are able to meet the stated government target and vaccinate fifteen millions of our most vulnerable citizens before mid-February 2021. Unfortunately, for some, 2021 shall sadly remain ‘The Road to Hell’. Whatever your trials during 2020, please God that 2021 is a better year for us all.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 14th January 2021

14/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants who live in Ireland. We wish a happy birthday to Kathleen Power who lives in Portlaw, Waterford, the Irish village of my birth. We also send birthday greetings to Ruth Byrne, another Portlaw woman who now lives in Dunboyne, County Meath, Ireland, and finally, we wish happy birthday to Eamon O Maoilderig who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. Enjoy your special day, Kathleen, Ruth, and Eamon, and thank you for being my Facebook friend. 

My song today is ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’. This is a twelve-bar blues song written in 1954 by Jesse Stone, an American Rhythm & Blues musician; also known under the pseudonyms, Charles F. Calhoun, and Chuck Calhoun (his song-writing names). The original recording by Big Joe Turner is ranked Number 127 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of ‘The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time’. 

The record was covered by ‘Bill Hayley & His Comets’ in June, 1954, the same week Turner's version first topped the R&B charts. Haley's version was released in August and reached Number 7 on the ‘Billboard Singles Chart’. Elvis Presley recorded the song twice in 1955 and 1956.

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When this song was first recorded by Bill Hayley, I had been out of the hospital for around 18 months but could not walk. I had been run over by a large wagon a few years earlier. The wagon had knocked me down, run over me, and stopped on top of me with my body twisted around the main drive propellor shaft. I was received into Batley Hospital with several life-threatening injuries and a body of broken bones. I had a damaged spine, a crushed chest with all but two of my chest ribs broken, a pierced lung, and my legs and arms were each broken in a minimum of two places. My left leg was badly broken on the kneecap; an injury that left me crippled for a long time even after my spine later corrected its own injury. I was on the hospital critical list for over four weeks and my parents were initially told that I was expected to die as my injuries were too intensive to survive. When I eventually pulled through, my parents were then told that my spinal injury would prevent me from ever walking again. 

I did not walk for almost three years, and when the song I sing today was first released, I was barely able to stand unaided on my two feet. My left leg which had been badly broken on the knee in three places required over fifty operations, breaking and resetting it over the years ahead. All the operations on my leg left it three inches shorter than my right leg. I had been a good dancer before my traffic accident, but in 1956 I could barely hobble; let alone ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. I would be 17 years old (1959) before I regained sufficient agility in my legs and enough body balance to be able to resume a more normal life and move on the dance floors again. 

While I was always popular with my peer group, my extensive injuries in boyhood pushed me into a more adult frame of mind long before my time. I began a decade's programme of physical improvement to regain full walking mobility, restore my body balance, and affect ways to minimise a very pronounced limp which my different leg lengths produced. I started a programme of relaxation and meditation as an 11-year-old boy in Batley hospital, and all of my reading material thereafter was about eastern methods to mediate pain, along with the meditation of mind and body. I became a student in this area, and which I later developed and practised for the rest of my life, besides instructing for over fifty years. I also became a sports fanatic and specifically focused on all sporting activities which required perfect balance to acquire a competent level of accomplishment. I engaged in rugby, boxing, tennis, horse riding, fencing, and judo. 

Of all my activities during my first twenty years of life, singing and dancing were always at the top of my tree. I had won numerous talent contests for singing as a young boy, and I had also won a medal for old-time dancing before I was aged 11. I would have to say that in music I found me! I discovered that singing and dancing did not prevent me competing on equal terms with anyone else, and that how many siblings one had, or whether one lived on or off a council estate, or what type of job dad did, mattered not one jot on either the dance floor or the singing stage. I had engaged in old-time dancing between the ages of 9-11 years once weekly at the 'Keir Hardie Hall' in Liversedge. 

I had just progressed from ‘old-time’ to ‘modern dancing’ when the wagon ran over me. After trapping me beneath its undercarriage, I was left the recipient of physical injuries that kept me off the dance floor for the following seven years. My balance would never again be good enough to glide around the dance floor with a bonny lass in my arms as we waltzed or did some modern ballroom dance. While all modern dancing demanded agility of body and dexterity and adroitness of foot, I knew that there was no grace to be seen or any more medals to be had in a limping hobble.

Ever since boyhood when I first started to notice the differences between boys and girls, I had never been able to separate 'dancing' from 'romancing'. Despite any muscular distractions or restrictive limitations in body movement which the pain in my healing legs produced after my bad traffic accident, I was still able to attract the young women with my 'James Dean' lookalike face which promised everything with a bit of imagination. Then, in the late 1950s, it was as though an angel from heaven had prised opened the dark clouds in the sky and let the sunlight shine through again. I was provided with access back into my heaven. I now had a means of getting back on that dance floor when 'Rock & Roll' hit the nation and woke up every jumping, jiving, and gyrating youthful body muscle in Great Britain. 

As this new dance craze swept across the Atlantic Ocean, its influence upon the youth of the day and their parents would create a generation gap that would never again narrow. This generation gap widened with the passing of every year. It mattered not which fashion between parent and child was compared, both young and old found the counter fashion wholly unacceptable. In areas of dress, hairstyle, decency, and decorum parents started to deprecate the new-age manners and clothes of their adolescent offspring. The term ‘teenager’ was born as an old era died.

Young boys and girls stopped being ‘little men’ and ‘little women’ who had once aspired to be grown-up versions of mum and dad. They changed their dress sense overnight, and in their parent’s eyes, they lost it altogether. By wearing clothing of indecent cut and proportion, their daughters now provided their boyfriends with the sight of more feminine leg, thigh, and underwear than their mothers had ever shown dad before their honeymoon night. Parents instantly rejected this new devil’s dance that their children moved to with sexual suggestion and moral degradation. The only place they could now envisage their once respectable sons and daughters going was to hell and back in a handcart! Their daughters had not only abandoned all propriety of dress code, but they had also gone economically mad as they paid more of their hard-earned money to the modern dressmaker for the provision of less material with which to make a skimpy garment which carried a tag marked ‘easy pickings’.

As for their sons, they stopped enlisting in the Armed Forces with their short-back-and-sides haircuts on parade. Instead, they joined the Teddy Boy gangs and changed their black leather shoes for Beatle Crushers in blue suede, their cravats for string ties, and their bell-bottomed flared trousers for legged drainpipes. Instead of cropping their head of hair short like their fathers, they grew the Edwardian sideburns of their great grandfathers, gelled up their greasy long hair, and sealed it behind the back of their head with a duck’s-arse crease as sharp as the razor blade they carried inside their Edwardian coat lapel. Some Teddy Boys, unsure of their fighting skills in unarmed hand-to-hand combat might conceal a swish blade or knuckle duster as they ran into battle against their Easter Monday foe on the sands of Brighton Beach. Instead of riding a ‘Crusader Mark 1 Tank’ to confront the enemy as dad had done in ’World War Two’ on the ‘Beaches of Dunkirk’, the Teddy Boys drove motorbikes to meet their seaside enemy. They annually battled with an Army of Mods who loved Cliff Richard records and rode Lambretta Scooters adorned with dozens of side mirrors.  Every Easter Monday, two young armies would fight for first blood on the sands of Brighton Beach. This annual almighty bust up to end all future bust-ups would make the front page of every national newspaper on Easter Tuesday and the disappointed parents of every Teddy Boy and Mod in England would tut their disapproval and say something like, “In my day…….” to which their teenage son or daughter would say, “For God’s sake, this is 1960 not……” before slamming the door shut and going out.

I will never forget the long picture queues (cinema queues to you under 70 years old) that stretched a mile around the block, and the film that young picture patrons danced to in the aisle to the beat of the hip-shaking and rock and roll movements. The American film,' Rock Around the Clock' featuring Bill Haley and His Comets had come to town and has never gone away since! 

Fortunately for me, it was a Godsend when 'Rock & Roll' hit the dance halls, and bopping offered me the timely opportunity to engage in a more individual freestyle of dancing which enabled me to mask any deficiency in leg length. So long as I could move my hips in tune to the music beat, I found that my feet followed the direction of my mind. I was back in business, and my ‘Blessed Trinity of Talent’ in singing, bopping, and fighting provided me with a renewed popularity within the male and female peer group of Windybank Estate. The pleasure of dancing and romancing was well and truly back on the cards, and life looked good once more. 

Love and peace
​Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 13th January 2021

13/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to two birthday celebrants. They are Laura Hanson who lives in my own village of Haworth, West Yorkshire, and Kathleen Mullins who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. Enjoy your special day, ladies, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ’Across the Borderline’. This the fortieth studio album by Willie Nelson 

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Although freedom of movement has never been greater in any previous century than exists today (outside current pandemic Covid-19 virus spread), there will always remain borders between one country and another. Ever since mankind built their own house and placed a picket fence around it to define their own private territory, borders have gradually grown in direct correlation with the price and expansion of land across the world.

Initially, geographical changes created natural borders between one landmass and another by the separating divisions of seas and oceans across the globe. As the human population grew, each nation was prepared to defend its territory by any means necessary. The more powerful world tribes seized the land of others by declaring war on them, and after defeating them, they re-drew and redefined borders, acknowledging their newer and more powerful status.

All patriots within every land across the world prize and love their country as a most precious thing; something splendid enough to risk war to defend whenever necessary. It is thought by politicians worldwide that if a country cannot defend its borders, it becomes vulnerable to invasion by other countries, other customs, cultures, and outside controls. Indeed, the very insistence by Great Britain upon maintaining its own red-line areas in its negotiations with the European Union before 1st January 2021 centred upon this very issue of sovereignty, and the right to govern one’s own waters, currency, laws, and borders.  On the other side of the dispute, the European Union holds the view that the sovereignty of every country within the continent of Europe is less defined by their borders, and more by the commonality of their laws, institutions, and trading agreements within an area of free movement. 

It is no surprise today that the greatest businesses in the world today have made their increasing wealth year-upon-year because of the growth of the Internet. The internet is so powerful that it knows no national borders, and yet it acknowledges the power and influence of every nation which is capable of influencing its profits. Such power of countries like China and Russia enables them to influence powerful sections of social media in not applying the same social conditions to them as is applicable to democratic countries across the globe. Facebook social media is just one example of new selective borders being operated across the world in uneven practice. Indeed, as the spread of social media becomes a more powerful a force of influence and persuasion in society, we can observe all manner of governments across the world seeking to harness this power on their own behalf. 

National borders are in many ways a macro reflection of individual behaviour. Just as each country establishes its own borders which must be observed by other nations, then so individuals behave comparably by establishing personal boundaries which influence and dictate the parameters of socially acceptable behaviour and mixing.

Changes in land borders and boundaries in social behaviour will, from one generation to the next, be resisted or welcomed with equal dislike by different sections of the world and society, and for different reasons. It is healthy for the advancement of civilisation that the young and the old do not think alike, and it is natural for one society and another, one country and another, one culture and another, one religion and another, and one race and another to discriminate in favour of one’s own side and beliefs. Your opinion will reflect the march of time; either taking a step back or pushing ahead in a forward direction! As far as I am concerned, there is no limit to genuine progress, and that the only way to define one’s limits is to go beyond them wherever possible.

The young person today is more universal in outlook than any older member of society, and it is right that this is so. It was with no surprise that during recent referendums, the younger voter saw their future as being more closely aligned with Europe than did my own older generation who voted to leave. Who is to say that they are wrong, and we are right?  If my studentship of history over a lifetime has taught me one thing, it is this. Prosperity brings with it the greatest prospect of peace. European wars in the past were frequently fought over free access to trade. The lesson of history is that when goods no longer cross borders, soldiers and their military will.

At some stage in every nation’s development, we are all prospective migrants. All national borders on maps are artificial constructs, and as such, they are as unnatural to our young today as they are to birds flying overhead. The only legitimate border is one of love, light, air, and hope. The love of one’s country is an admirable and splendid thing, but there is no earthly reason why love should stop at one’s border; light and air don’t, and neither should hope! Once a person’s mind and heart are open to the possibility of any idea or notion of love, there is no limitation to their body of travel, no darkness to prevent passage as they walk into the light ahead. That is how I imagine the final steps towards heaven to be like, where the only signposts are those of positive human traits which lead inexorably toward ‘The Land of Love’.

Love and peace 

Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 12th January 2021

12/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants. We wish happy birthday to Helen Butler and  Carly Ni Breathnech who live in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland, and Kitty Hite who lives in Rancho Cucamonga, California, America. All three ladies celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your special day.

We also remember the anniversary of Veronica Crean-Bastow’s father Joe today. Joe died from a massive heart attack at the early age of 53 years on January 12th, 1976,  six months before Veronica’s wedding. Joe is much loved and greatly missed. RIP Joe.

My song today is ‘The House of The Rising Sun”. This is a traditional folk song that tells of a person's life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans. The song urges children to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version of this record was recorded in 1964 by the British rock group ‘The Animals’. This was a Number 1 hit on the ‘UK Single’s Chart’, and was also a success in the United States and France. 

Like many classic folk ballads, ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ is of uncertain authorship. According to Alan Lomax, ‘The Rising Sun’ was the name of a bawdy house in two traditional English songs, and it was also a common name for English pubs.  

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When I was a courting teenager between my 16th and 18th year of life, a group of underage drinkers from Windybank Estate, Liversedge would frequently walk across to Roberttown (about 3-miles away from Windybank Estate) to a pub called ‘The Rising Sun.’ once every week on wage night. There were four pubs on our three-mile journey, but only one drinking establishment where we knew we would all get served. Ironically, the only mate who was 18 years of age (and therefore legally entitled to be served alcohol) was the smallest in stature, the youngest looking, and the one group member who was most often refused bar service on the grounds that he wasn’t old enough to be served. His name was George, and despite being the oldest, he had never had a girlfriend and was the least experienced gang member in the courtship department.

At the time, ‘The Rising Sun’ was a pub in dire need of refurbishment and was known as being an establishment of disrepute which locals frequently referred to as being ‘a knocking shop’. The landlord would do anything to increase his weekly earnings and was known to turn a blind eye to underage drinkers and the occasional prostitute touting for trade. 

Every wage night, ‘The Rising Sun’ world be patronised by about a dozen Heckmondwike girls who would walk a mile up the hill from Heckmondwike centre to Roberttown for ‘a girl’s night out’. Please note that the term “girls’ night out” had a more liberal meaning when spoken by a Heckmondwike girl as opposed to a young woman off the estate where I lived. When the Windybank Estate girls went on “a girl’s night out”, they were usually a group of single young women who were out for a few ‘Babychams’, a good laugh, and the telling of the occasional dirty joke. That is as far as their “girl’s night out” went. However, when the Heckmondwike girls went out, they went out!  They deliberately went out of their way to get everything and anything on offer that might bring a bit more excitement into their lives at little cost to their own purse. As to their status, most were single women who usually had boyfriends somewhere in their lives, and a few even had a husband awaiting their return home at the end of the evening. Whether married, single, engaged or otherwise committed, none of the Heckmondwike female patrons advertised the fact on their ring fingers, and what they might be prepared to get up to for a few free drinks was nobody’s business, as long as it stayed in ‘The Rising Sun’ and did not make its way back down the hill toward the Heckmondwike gossip mongers.   

It soon became known that ‘The Rising Sun’ was the pub to frequent on a wage night if you were looking for more than a good head of beer and had no intention of walking back home with your mates at the end of the night. 

I recall a wicked joke being played on George one night at ‘The Rising Sun’; the oldest, shyest and least experienced mate among us. George was a bit overweight, which was an uncommon characteristic of youth in the days of the late 1950s when exercise, walking, and fresh air were to be found in abundance. George had never dated a proper girlfriend, and the only sexual experience he’d ever encountered would have been with himself. He wasn’t afraid of trying to hit it off with a young woman, and apart from the occasional dance, he would usually have his advances immediately declined and get the quick brush off; general responses that undoubtedly increased his level of sexual frustration. My mates who initiated the joke on George selected him as being the one chap in the group who was more likely to fall for the prank. George swallowed the story he was told hook, line, and sinker, and the result of him responding as anticipated got him barred from the pub for looking up a young woman’s skirt. 

One of the Windybank lads pointed out a Heckmondwike woman with large calves to George. She was aged around twenty and was a regular wage-night visitor with the Heckmondwike group of women. The young woman concerned was obviously a female who looked after herself. She was slender in build and was very womanly and desirable in attractiveness. She was known to be an athletic runner at weekends and her legs were very muscular. There weren’t any of my mates (including myself) who would have ‘kicked her out of bed’ and said ‘No’ to her, had she ever indicated to them that ‘Yes’ was a distinct possibility!

On one evening in question at ‘The Rising Sun’ one of the group began setting the trap to fool George. He told George in a ‘matter-of-fact’ way that he heard it on good authority that the young woman in question with the muscular calves was said to never wear any underwear during warm summer months. George was told that if he strategically positioned himself sitting across the pub lounge from the young woman in question, he might see something to his advantage. George was fed a truthful fact about the young woman being a runner with an athletic club on the Cleckheaton/Littletown Road. He was then fed further duff information about certain dress fashion of female runners during hot weather months. He was told that most female track runners race around the track without wearing knickers when they run on a hot summer’s evening, as wearing underwear chafes the athlete’s thighs and slows their performance. George was also told that the young woman was a person who maintained this dress code of going without knickers on hot summer evenings, whether she was running that night. George was also told that it was rumoured that a few of her Heckmondwike mates also ‘went without’. Once George had been spoon-fed this duff information, the rest was simply left to his imagination and sexual frustration.

For the following three weeks in succession, George would carefully select his seating position in the pub, and he would even ask a mate to change places with him if it gave him a better advantage view. He would spend the better part of the evening trying to ‘look up’ the dress or skirt of the young woman concerned across from him (something that he would undoubtedly be prosecuted for today) but not then. After the first evening of George trying to confirm whether the young woman in question was ‘with’ or ‘without’ he reported back that ‘he had seen it all’ within twenty minutes of glancing across the pub floor. None of us believed him of course, but after George repeated his claim convincingly another week, I must admit we all started wondering if the joke that we had played on George had come back to bite us on the bum with a vengeance? 

Just as a point of reference about the late 1950s for any youngsters out there. Young women of the gentrified and upper classes who attended ‘Finishing School’ in Switzerland would be taught deportment and etiquette. Such instruction would make them act more ladylike in all situations. They would be taught how to carry themselves proudly, walk properly, eat daintily, and adopt ladylike postures when seated or getting into and out of a car without showing all and sundry what they wore beneath their evening clothes. 

As for young women of the working class, especially those Heckmondwike women who worked at either the carpet factory or one of the town’s textile mills, the only time they got into a car was on their wedding day! For them, it was the public bus or “Shank’s Pony” that took them to wherever they wanted to go. As to deportment and all manner of strategically seated etiquette, the only time a woman crossed her legs in my day was if she was dying to have a wee and risked wetting her knickers if she couldn’t hold it a minute longer! 

The above is my lasting memory of the days of my youth when we would go to ‘The Rising Sun’ in Roberttown and came across the weekly crowd of young women from Heckmondwike on a fun night out. Those were the days, and many were the nights when……………. 

I have often wondered what happened to George and if he is still with us as he was a couple of years older than me and would be 80 years old now if still alive. My advanced apologies to any old Heckmondwike woman reading this post, especially any who went to ‘The Rising Sun’ in Roberttown on a wage night between 1959-1961; and particularly any forgetful perspiring female on a summer’s evening who thought, “Oh! What the hell! Nobody will ever know?”

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 11th January 2021

11/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to two birthday celebrants. We wish John McKeegan a happy birthday. John is a close neighbour. He and his wife, Joanne, are the landlord and landlady of ‘The Black Bull’ in Haworth. Well, John, if one has to be isolated in lockdown, there are fewer places I’d choose to be today than in a pub with a good-looking red-headed barmaid at hand, to pull you a pint of course! Enjoy your special day, mate.

We also wish a happy birthday to Diane Holroyd. Diane comes from my old teenage hunting ground of Cleckheaton and now lives in Blackpool. Enjoy your special day, Diane.

My song today is ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes’. This song was written by Bob McDill and was recorded by American country music artist Keith Whitley. It was released in March 1988 and reached the Number 1 spot in the United States. It peaked at Number 2 in Canada and was Billboard's Number-1 country single of the year in 1988. The song was also later covered by Alan Jackson and Garth Brooks.

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I have often wondered why some people close their eyes when they are giving their lover a romantic kiss and others don’t. Surveys have shown that most men keep their eyes open to kiss their lovers while most women close their eyes when snogging. I remember my mother telling me, “Billy, there is no fool like an old fool. Never kiss someone with your eyes closed. They could be laughing at you unknowingly to your face!” If I was to speculate why some people close their eyes when kissing, I might suspect it was the lips of another who they had on their mind at the time. It has been well documented that the picture of the person one has in their mind when they are making passionate love, is not always the image of the man or woman to whom they are making love.

Scientifically, we are told that people close their eyes while kissing to allow the brain to properly focus on the task at hand, and psychologists have found that ‘tactile awareness’ (sense of touch) depends on the level of perceptual load in a concurrent visual task. Psychologists believe that kissing with closed eyes gives participants a better chance of moving towards more intimate interaction by keeping them focused and allowing them to build the momentum of a kiss, rather than quickly getting distracted and diverting their attention elsewhere.

I have always kept my eyes open when kissing a woman. I recognise, that like most men, I am a visual person in things I derive pleasure and satisfaction from. I do not know if this part of my heterosexual behaviour requires visual stimulation to achieve greater sexual arousal, or whether I have never forgotten what my mother once told me in jest about the other person laughing at me to my face unknowingly should I close my eyes.

Come to think of it, I would not put anything past this modern generation of kissing cousins and cell-phone snoggers, whose attention span is all of three seconds before their mind suddenly switches to another task. Besides, in today’s all-embracing world of heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, pansexual, etc etc, it is difficult enough for any regular guy to know with any certainty the true nature of the other person they are kissing and exchanging the taste of lipstick products with.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 10th January 2021

10/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants, each with a connection to myself. First, we wish a happy birthday to Sandra Chapman, who lives in Heckmondwike with her husband, Bill. Sandra and I worked in the same Probation Office in Dewsbury for many years, and prior to her retirement, she enjoyed being a member of a theatre production group that put on musicals every year. We also wish a happy birthday to Teddy 0’ Brien and Anthony McGrath who were born in the same Irish village and County as I was. Enjoy your special day, Sandra, Teddy, and Anthony.

My song today is ‘Unforgettable’. This popular song was written by Irving Gordon. The song's original working title was ‘Uncomparable’; however, the music publishing company asked Gordon to change it to "Unforgettable". The song was published in 1951. The most popular version of the song was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1951 from his album ‘Unforgettable’ (1952). In 1991, the remixed version reached Number 14 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart, and also Number 3 on the ‘Billboard Adult Contemporary Chart’. The song also won three awards at the 34th Annual Grammy Awards (1992): ‘Song of the Year’: ‘Record of the Year’, and ‘Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance’. Nat King Cole's original recording was inducted into the ‘Grammy Hall of Fame’ in 2000. 

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The things which remain the most memorable are the things that were the most unusual in our lives. That is what makes them ‘unforgettable’.

When I ran adult social skills groups between the 1970s and the 1990s, one of my group sessions would include how to improve one’s memory. Improving one’s memory essentially involves understanding and reversing the process of ‘how we forget’. The human brain is less likely to take on board and remember any detail which is introduced to it in a boring or matter of fact way. Conversely, the human brain is more likely to receive and remember any details which is presented to it in a manner that stimulates the imagination and evokes an associative feeling.

Let us look at the task of two teachers who are wanting their class to learn the same poem by heart. The first thing for the two teachers to decide is ‘the process’. They need to ask themselves, which is the best method which is most likely to help the pupils remember the words of the poem? Do I ask them to open their textbooks, and instruct them to keep reading the poem over and over until they can recite the poem by heart? Or do I keep reading the poem out loud to them, and emphasising different sections as I go along by putting more feeling into where and how I speak the words so as to produce the most dramatic effect on the listener’s ears? 

None of us need to guess which is the best teaching method to employ. Whichever teacher can best capture the interest of their pupils from the start of the lesson will be on a winning streak. Once their pupil’s interest has been captured, the receptive forces of the pupil’s mind and body are more likely to follow suit and surrender to the teacher’s tactical methods of instructive ‘association’. 

I recall seeing a film about Robin Hood when I was a child. In the film, Robin was telling his men of Sherwood Forest that if they stuck together, they would become a much stronger force that the Sherriff of Nottingham would find harder to beat than if they continued to fight their battles with him individually. To demonstrate this point, Robin decided to show them what he meant. He took one arrow shaft and asked one of his men to break it in two, which was done with little effort. Then, Robin placed two arrow shafts side-by-side and asked his man to break them in two again. When Robin repeated the task with three arrow shafts side-by-side, his man found them impossible to break!

Whenever a teacher takes two separate things and places them together side-by-side, it is virtually impossible for the class pupil to continue to view those two separate things any longer as representing a single entity. The most effective of teachers know this, and that is why they chose to ally their spoken words with the creative imagery of their class pupils. The combination of these two things (the teacher’s spoken word and the pupil’s mental imagery) are immediately joined by the third crucial element of ‘feeling’ in this learning process. Once words, imagery, and feeling have been associated within one lesson or life event, the holy trinity of ‘an unforgettable experience’ has been formed (and like the three arrow shafts demonstration by Robin Hood) cannot be broken! That is why some people in their old age can still recite word for word, a poem, or part of some famous speech in a Shakespearian play that they were introduced to in class as a child. 

In my late 40s, I decided to take a teacher training course for working with adult students at night school. During this course, I was introduced to a lesson I never forgot. There are two types of people when we examine the ways one predominantly uses their brains to learn. The Left-brained person is the individual who is and looks at the problems of life in a logical, rational, and practical way. They place greater importance upon the spoken word. They tend to be the practical doers with a bit of thinking thrown in. Then, there is the Right-brained individual who is influenced more by imagery. They tend to be the more artistic type of person who experiences and sees things in a different way to the Left-hand brained person. Put these two types into a heated discussion and they will never see eye to eye about the same topic which they experience differently. 

The teaching lesson that remained with me was this. The two types of learners in any class need two different types of methods to learn the same thing. All the Left-brained learners will respond better and take in the required detailed knowledge if they are being taught by the spoken words of the teacher at the front of the class; whereas all the Right-brained learners will respond better and learn more easily if the teacher draws a picture or a diagram of what he is trying to impart to his pupils on the blackboard or by overhead projected images and pictures. That is why the best teachers and lecturers do both, by talking and showing images. In this way, they appeal to the most prominent learning methods of all their pupil class; both Left-brained and Right-brained!

This combination of the precise words we use, the images we create inside our heads, and the feelings we emote within our bodies determine the nature of all our experiences. Our experiences can represent something which is positive and life-affirming, as well as being capable of representing unhealthy and emotionally disturbed states of mind and body. However, that is a subject for another day.

Love and peace
​Bill xxx 

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Song For Today: 9th January 2021

9/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to my great nephew, Brandon Foster, who lives with his parents, Janie and husband, Chris Foster down in Fareham, Hampshire. It is Brandon’s birthday today. We also wish a happy birthday to Mary Kate O’Sullivan Hogan (she sounds a lot like Mary Kate Danaher from ‘The Quiet Man‘ film, doesn’t she?). Mary Kate lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary Ireland. Enjoy your special day, Brandon, and Mary Kate.

My song today is ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’. This country music ballad was written and composed by Kris Kristofferson and released on his 1970 album ‘Kristofferson’. It was covered later in 1970 by Sammi Smith on the album ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’.  Sammi Smith's recording of the song remains the most commercially successful, and best-known, version in the United States. ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ also became Smith's signature song. 

Other cover versions which were inspired by Smith's success with the song included Tammy Wynette: Loretta Lynn: Glen Campbell: Dottie West: Joan Baez: Jerry Lee Lewis: Elvis Presley: Mariah Carey: 10-year-old Lena Zavaroni: Michael Buble: Gladys Knight &The Pips, and Willie Nelson. 

Kristofferson's original lyrics speak of a man's yearning for sexual intimacy. They were controversial in 1971 when the song was first covered by a woman, Sammi Smith in that case: "I don't care what's right or wrong, I don't try to understand / Let the devil take tomorrow, Lord tonight I need a friend."

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Many people will stay awake nights for many different reasons. Some may be unable to sleep because of pain or illness, others from worrying thoughts preying on their mind, and some because they are facing some momentous event the following day that will emotionally drain them and sap their energy levels. Fear may stop some people getting to sleep while nightmares may produce a fearful awakening. Whatever prevents one settling at night, the one thing of which we can be sure is that not being able to sleep is a most unwelcome and health-draining experience.

I recall a lengthy hospital experience after incurring a life-threatening traffic accident at the age of 11 years, when a large wagon knocked me down on the estate where I lived. The wagon ran over me and stopped on top of me with my body wrapped around the main drive propellor shaft. I suffered several life-threatening injuries including a damaged spine, collapsed lungs, a crushed chest and every limb in my body broken in at least two or three places each. I was at death’s door for a month and when I eventually regained full consciousness, I was in excruciating pain. I remained in hospital for nine months and had over fifty operations on my legs during a two-year period. I was unable to walk for three years after my accident.

When I was initially run over, my body was in so much pain that it did not register. When I eventually regained consciousness in the hospital, it was like being run over by a lorry again. No number of analgesics could numb the pain. For many months, pain registered only in the upper part of my body initially as my spinal damage left me with no feeling at all below my waistline. At first it was feared that I would never walk again, but after four or five months in hospital, the connection reappeared between brain and legs as the spinal signal system corrected itself. Once my spine started functioning again, the pain reappeared in my legs with an intensity that is indescribable, but ‘pain in my legs’ represented ‘life having returned to my my legs’, and I was happy to feel it! 

For almost six of my nine months in Batley Hospital, the high-level of pain I felt continuously would keep me awake all night as the rest of the ward slept soundly. It was very strange and frightening for an eleven-year-old boy in a man’s hospital ward to be awake in the dark of the night while other patients slept soundly, unknowingly groaned, farted, and even died (requiring the nurses to get the porters to take the corpse to the morgue while they remade the bed with fresh sheets, ready for a new occupant the following day).

Those long nights awake on the hospital ward left one with their thoughts being the only thing to occupy them. I learned that things which are capable of scaring any boy during the daytime appear ten times more frightening in the dark of night with only oneself to talk them over with. 

In my 60th year of life, I had two massive heart attacks in the same week and was unconscious for four days as my family gathered around my ‘death bed’. After having a pacemaker installed, I miraculously recovered, as the heart stents they installed all collapsed. Paradoxically, I have not had any trouble with my heart functioning since, although I have greatly modified my lifestyle and never over-energise myself.

During my 70th year of life, I contracted a terminal blood cancer and needed three years of monthly blood transfusions (each one lasting six hours) and two nine-month courses of chemotherapy. During this three-year period, I was to have three emergency admissions when I was close to death after developing a lymphoma. Indeed, my death was medically expected by the hospital staff, and I was placed in an ‘end-of-life’ ward and had a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ placed on me without the knowledge of myself and wife, and most certainly without the sought permission or consent of either of us. Beware! It appears that this unconventional and morally indefensible medical practice is seemly perfectly legal under certain medical circumstances and conditions prevailing and can be authorised by any head of the ward that day. 

During each of these emergency hospital stays (lasting around one month each), I remained critical in condition while being fully conscious throughout my hospital residency. On each occasion, my death was thought to be imminent, although this thought never once crossed my mind. To me, I was poorly, and I felt very ill, but I never once considered myself to be dying. What I do recall vividly about these emergency hospital stays was the high level of body pain that kept me awake during most of the night, and which led me to sleep on and off during day-time hours. My third emergency hospital stay saw me being in ‘an end-of-life ward’ with three other dying patients. 

I found it very unsettling after I told them ‘I was on the wrong type of ward’ and I was simply ignored. Indeed, my first conversation with another patient on that ward was to introduce myself by saying, “Hello there, I’m Bill. Pleased to meet you!” to which the other patient replied, “You won’t be knowing me too long as the doctor has just told me that I only have 14 days left to live!” It was after this unexpected response I received the added information, “There again, we’re all dying on this small side ward, as it is an ‘end-of-life ward’, you know!” The point was, prior to that precise moment, I didn’t know! As soon as I found out, I wanted out of there as soon as possible, but my request was repeatedly denied.

My response was one of utter anger. The patient across from me who had been handed a doctor’s death warrant half an hour before I was admitted to the ward then told me that the other two patients in the small ward had also been served with their medical death warrants and added that all three of them were being allowed home ‘to die’. I was not able to go home, and my request to move wards was flatly refused. I was so angry that I determined that whenever and wherever I was to die, it would not be now or on that ward! The other three patients on the ward subsequently died over the month ahead. I still recall the long nights in pain for three weeks of my stay when I was unable to even manage half an hour’s sleep. 

This hospital experience took my mind immediately back sixty years to the time when I lay awake as an 11-year-old boy in Batley Hospital during the early morning hours as other patients slept or occasionally died around me.  Indeed, I found it wholly inexplicable that any of the other cancer-ward patients could sleep, knowing that within the month, that is all they would never do thereafter!  After I determined not to die there and then, my immediate response was to start writing another novel. I already had 63 published novels to my name, and I was determined that I would write another called ‘Fourteen Days’ which I drafted in rough during my long nights awake on the end-of-life ward in ‘Airedale Hospital’. The beginning of the novel contained a factual account of my entry onto the end-of-life ward, and after penning the first few factual chapters, I allowed my artistic licence to stray into the realm of pure fiction. It is ironic that writing about my own dying experience during the night was probably a major factor in keeping me alive to live another day, and then another, and another!

I had been a Probation Officer for over 25 years before disability obliged me to retire prematurely at the early age of 53 years when severe osteoarthritis impeded my walking ability once more. During my Probation Officer career, I was to work with many people who spent nights unable to sleep because of some problem they experienced. The range of problems would be physical, mental, emotional, or psychological, often dating back to their years of their childhood and early life. Some clients had recurring nightmares because of physical, psychological, or sexual abuse perpetrated by a father figure. Some women had been raped or had been married to a wife batterer, and from three women serving long prison sentences in a Wakefield women’s prison with whom I worked, one had killed her crying child one night by smothering the child with a pillow, after the distressed child had kept her awake on three consecutive night, crying all night long. The two other women prisoners I worked with had killed abusive partners they had lived with and could not escape from. Both were frequently reported to have been victims of forced sex and physical assaults by their partners.

Since I have been a member of the social media network of Facebook, I have befriended many people (women mostly) who have had bad experiences with menfolk they have either married, met, or courted before being betrayed, lied to, and deserted by. There are so many women out there who spend most of their nights awake and ruminating about things ‘that might have been, if only…..’

In my professional past, I soon discovered the real harm that prolonged periods of lost and unsettled sleep can cause. That is why fifty years ago, I specifically made a relaxation tape that was designed to send the user off to sleep with its pace of speech (identical to the breathing pattern of a sleeping person) and its subliminal messages (self-hypnotic suggestions). The tape was highly successful, and since 1972, over 10,000 recordings have been freely handed out to people with sleeping disorders. I turned down an offer of £10,000 to sell the copyright to the relaxation tape during the 1970s to a musical company, and have always provided copies of the tape free to people in need of it. 

Because I have practised Relaxation Training since the age of 11 years (I am now 78 years old) and because I have instructed Relaxation training for over fifty years, even in the mid-1970s, I was regarded as being one of the country’s most authoritative sources on Relaxation Training. Anyone wishing to improve their sleeping practice, or lower their blood pressure levels, or simply reduce their stress factors has free access to my tape, ‘Relax with Bill’. Bear in mind that although produced to the highest of studio quality for its time when it was originally recorded (and which cost me £2000 of my own money to produce in 1973/4), that original recording is now fifty years old, and yet it is still being daily used by hundreds of satisfied people across the world. It could ‘help you make it through the night’?

PS: Three types of people for whom the Relaxation/Self-Hypnosis Tape is UNSUITABLE include: (1) Persons with brain damage: (2) Pregnant women: (3) People whose blood pressure level is always low. The reasons for the above exclusions is that the Relaxation Tape significantly lowers blood-pressure levels, which is ideal for the vast majority of trainees, especially people whose blood-pressure levels are far too high anyway, but which is medically dangerous for people whose blood pressure levels are usually too low. The Relaxation Tape also helps to produce favourable brainwave changes, but it is considered unwise to be used by people with brain damage of any type. If you play the tape in bed, before the month is out, you will be asleep before the tape reaches its ends
http://www.fordefables.co.uk/.../01_relaxation_with_bill.mp3

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 8th January 2021

8/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to Ronnie Fitzgerald who lives in Clonmel, Tipperary, Ireland: John Flynn who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Terry Baldwinson who lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire and Carol Law who lives in Keighley, West Yorkshire.  Ronnie, John, Terry, and Carol all celebrate their birthday today. We hope that you enjoy your special day folks.

My song today is ‘Lord I Hope This Day Is Good’. This song was written by Dave Hanner and recorded by American country music artist Don Williams. It was released in November 1981 and was Don Williams' twelfth Number 1 on the country chart.

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The content of this song is about a person praying to the Lord that ‘their day be good’, which on the surface seems to be a reasonable thing for any individual to do. However, there is a danger in always praying for things on our own behalf, especially if we can obtain those very same things by exerting our own energies and effort in the right direction. 

For example, let us say that a husband in a marriage refuses to do things for himself that he is perfectly able to do, but which he instead relies upon his wife doing for him? Anyone can see that by his action of counting on his wife’s goodwill, allied to his expectation that she will do those things he refuses to do for himself, her husband is abusing their relationship. In taking advantage of his wife’s good nature, he is being ‘lazy’. At best, he is being ‘inconsiderate’, and at worse, he is being downright ‘disrespectful’.

The very same can be argued to be true of mankind’s individual relationship with God. By making requests of God through prayer that He does something which is within your capability to do for yourself, you are being just as lazy, inconsiderate, and disrespectful to Him. While acknowledging that such things are within the power of the Lord to do, the implication of your entreaty is that the Lord should be expected to do on your behalf.  

The Bible, according to (Mark 14:36) and again in (Luke 22:42) says that Jesus Christ was in agony while he was being crucified on the cross. We sense the intense conflict in Jesus' prayer, as his sweat contained great droplets of blood (Luke 22:44). Jesus asked His Father to remove the cup of suffering. Then he surrendered, saying, "Not my will, but yours be done.” By these words, Jesus Christ was acknowledging the basic human feeling that as ‘God the Son’ He was not immune to pain, but also acknowledging that as ‘God made man’, He had been born to suffer and die for mankind in the most agonising of human ways and that for the scriptures to be fulfilled, the process needed to be carried out without the intercession of ‘God the Father’ in Heaven. (use of the standard Roman Catholic concept of ‘Three in One’ and the terms ‘God the Father’, ‘God the Son’ and ‘God the Holy Spirit’).

Why not ask God to always intercede on our behalf? I hear you ask. Like the song, today says, “it would be so easy for you to do’. Consider this. God created us. God gave us the earth to live on, and the means to exist through endowing our planet with all manner and form of plant, vegetation, animal, geographical, oceanic, and sky life. To humans, God gave a brain, and the only reason He would have done this was for us to use it! By doing so, God illustrated that He did not wish to live our lives for us nor determine our ultimate actions or destinies. Mankind was endowed with ‘free will’; the power to work out and to decide what action one requires to do or have done on their behalf. ‘Free will’ implies having the power to do right or wrong, whether your actions are the most or least appropriate action you could take in any situation you are in. You are given through all voluntary action that you perform the option of choice, which signifies the morality of the flag you fly.

Hence, mankind has the ‘freedom’ to elect their choice of action, inaction, or reaction! We can decide our action as an individual, as a group, a club, a community, or a country, but whatever the ultimate action is that we are part of and consciously complicit in, we are responsible for; either in part or whole, and for what we do, and how we do it!  

God does not wish mankind to war with each other or to engage in un-Christian, unhealthy, harmful, and hurtful acts, but there would have been no point in allowing humans ‘free will’ had He chosen to decide on our behalf what we do, when and how in any given situation. By giving mankind both a brain and a body that has the capability to respond appropriately, God provided mankind with the power to influence our own lives, and the lives of others for better or worse, and to remain the prime mover of our own thoughts and actions. Through ‘The Ten Commandments’ passed down to Moses, Jesus essentially gave us a bullet-point moral compass to accompany every man, woman, and child through their travel of life from cradle to grave. ‘The Ten Commandments’ are akin to any seafarer being provided with the rules of the sea and being given a map that charts the best course of travel to follow. However, there would be little purpose in God providing us with our own ship and means of transportation through our journey of life if He did not allow us to be the captain of our own vessel throughout the voyage, and the master of our own fate!

Consequently, (returning to the words of today’s song) granting somebody a ‘good day’ when they possess the means to make their day good by exercising their own brain, and by employing their own thoughts, feelings, and actions in a positive and coordinated direction, would be an abuse of the covenant (religious agreement and understanding) between the Creator and the created (mankind). 

Acquiring a greater knowledge and understanding of mind/body functioning over the past fifty years has led me to believe that there is nothing that is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that thinking it so will not make it so! Who, what, when, where, or how in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ experiential terms is largely determined by ourselves in how we think, feel, and act. God gave us a brain and body to decide and to do. He gave us the means to emote our feelings and a heart to generate our emotions in the doing of our actions.  And just for good measure, and as a means of constantly reminding His human creations how we can find the path that will take us from earth to heaven, the Lord provided every human being with the invisible attributes of a soul and a conscience to act as a moral compass as we travel through life from the cradle to the grave. The character we become will either sin against our fellow man or become a saving factor and a positive force for good in their lives and ours.

All beliefs are personal, and fewer beliefs are provable. Therefore, the only reason for the presence of any belief in anyone’s life is that it positively serves them and that is why the individual chooses to believe whatever it is they believe. We use our beliefs as a means of self-validation. Our beliefs give one a purpose for living and a justification for doing whatever we do. Our positive beliefs enable us to endure the sometimes unendurable experiences of mankind, and to live life wholesomely and in greater contentment or to experience a more negative existence through the absence of a healthy and positive belief system.

I believe that the Lord is good and that there are many occasions in the life of individuals and collective bodies across the world when God does intercede on our behalf, and in our positive interest, WHENEVER SUCH ACTION CANNOT BE PERFORMED BY ONESELF!  I believe that having lived with several terminal body cancers over the past decade and having successfully sailed the stormy seas and kept afloat without sinking and drowning during the past 78 years, I am living evidence that God has intervened on my behalf many times, especially after the prayerful intercession of numerous others. And believe me, while it is often said that ‘God loves a sinner’, if God has interceded on my behalf to extend my existence longer than I merit at this side of the green sod, then there is absolutely no reason in either heaven or on earth why God will not intercede on behalf of others far worthier than me. And please do not think that strength alone will keep the pillars of the temple of life standing. 

However strong an individual I might be, I would need the strength of ten biblical Samson’s to have endured the experiences of the past decade ‘unaided spiritually’ by a force that is greater than life itself. That is why I believe in God, and that is why I genuinely believe that God lives in us all! 

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 7th January 2021

7/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to four people. We wish a happy birthday to three women for being born on January 7th and we remember one woman who died on January 7th last year.

We wish a happy birthday to Geraldine McGuinn who lives in Carlow, Ireland: Siobhan Dunleavey who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland, and Debbie Green who lives in Honiton, East Devon. Enjoy your special day, Geraldine, Siobhan, and Debbie, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

Today, Regina Mullins asks us to celebrate the life and death of her dear friend, Marie Farrell, who died one year ago today, aged 50 years from aggressive cancer. Marie, who was born in Galway was an only child. Though she never had children of her own, she worked as a Child Care Officer and spent her career advocating for the needs improved welfare of disadvantaged children. Regina and Marie were the closest of lifelong friends, and Marie was a bridesmaid at Regina’s wedding. Her loss is still greatly felt by Regina. One year on. R.I.P. Marie.  

My song today is ‘The Times they Are-a Changing’. This song was written by Bob Dylan and released as the title track of his 1964 album of the same name. Dylan wrote the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the time, influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads. It would be interesting to know what Bob Dylan thinks about the past year when the Covid-19 virus has crossed the world in a pernicious cloak of indiscriminate death.

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Times will always produce change whether it pertains to fish, fowl, animal or human, or any creature which inhabits the land, sea, skies, or underground. That in essence is the core message of ‘evolution’ as expounded by Charles Darwin (1809-82), the English naturalist, geologist, biologist, and author of ‘On the Origin of Species’ (published 1859). Darwin’s proposition that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors is now widely accepted, and considered a foundational concept in science 

In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called ‘natural selection’, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in ‘selective breeding’. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and he was honoured by being buried in Westminster Abbey. 

When his theory was initially expounded, many believers in God found the theory incompatible with Christian tenets.  However, I am both a believer in the theory of Darwin, and also in the presence of a supreme being, I know as God who I believe created the heavens and earth. Two vital things need to be accepted to make both beliefs compatible in my mind. First, I accept that ‘time’ can be measured by more than one method and means, and secondly, scientists identify Darwin’s evolution theory as being the ‘process’ by which changes over time are explained, ever since the ‘Big Bang’ theory was universally accepted by academics. Science can postulate and can extrapolate how the process of all life (ie the ‘Big Bang’) came about, but science cannot state what/who instigated the ‘Big Bang’ that led to the creation/existence of the world as we know it today. 

Here is one paragraph copied from a scientific paper of recent years:

‘The Big Bang Theory' is a cosmological model of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of extremely high density and high temperature and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large -scale structure. Crucially, the theory observes that the farther away galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from Earth. Extrapolating this cosmic expansion backward in time using the known laws of physics, the theory describes a high-density state preceded by a singularity in which ‘SPACE AND TIME LOSE MEANING’ (the capitalisation of the last five words has been done by me).

The choices we have as thinking and rational individuals is whether we are more or less inclined towards the Christian story of ‘Creation’ or the scientific story of ‘Collision’, or can both stories be merely different chapters, written by a different hand, in the same Saga?

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Change is the one constant in all our lives. Indeed, change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past for confirmation of their present are certain to miss out on their future. The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change their future by merely changing their present attitude. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the course of history.

Change is always upon us, and for many, it is frightening to be taken out of one’s comfort zone of familiarity. It can seem incapacitating and deeply threatening, yet we can choose to embrace change as a challenge to make things better than they were, and move forward as a consequence. Constant change is necessary if we are to grow as a person in size, knowledge, and experience. Nothing stands still. Everyone who stands upon a rotating planet is by inference constantly on the move, and just as changes in nature are often imperceptible to the human eye, as they happen, we know that all plant life is constantly in the process of growth, even while the gardener sleeps.

If my greatest achievement in life is to be the man who founded the process of ‘Anger Management’ during the early 1970s, I can tell you truly, that advantageous method of work came about from my own life experiences, while being able to eventually harness and manage the anger states in the body of my youth in the most positive of ways. In short, I learned how to make my ‘anger’ work to my benefit! It took me a long time to learn how to manage my high anger levels until I was able to first discern the presence of anger in me, and then be able to distinguish between the anger which was natural and healthy to express and that harmful anger which needed to be expressed in a more acceptable form. Everyone thinks of changing the world sometimes, but few think first about the merits of changing themselves. Recognising and changing my own angry behaviour in my youth and learning how to make my ager states positively work for my own benefit, and understanding the process of that change, enabled me during my early thirties to introduce a verifiable and beneficial process to the world called ‘Anger Management’. Where others had successfully worked in reducing and better managing the unacceptably high levels of aggressive behaviour in some angry people before me, I founded a systematised method of how best to ensure that positive changes are more quickly brought about and are then reinforced and maintained. My process ensures that positively changed behaviour does not regress. 

For instance, without progress of positive behavioural change being reinforced and maintained within a new lifestyle, all change runs the risk of being merely temporary instead of more permanent. Consider: there is less merit in a dieter losing three stone in weight in six months if when they stop dieting, they do not maintain their good dieting behaviour, and instead gradually return to their bad old eating habits. Such failure to ‘reinforce’ and ‘maintain’ their positive changes in behaviour will simply mean they put back all the weight they temporarily lost, plus more besides!

Given the past year of pandemic virus spread of Covid-19 across the world, changes of an unpleasant and restrictive nature have been forced upon all of us in varying degrees and with different resulting circumstances. We will all remember these changing times for the way we experienced them. If the entire human population of the world has learned one thing only from the changes we have had to endure during 2020, it is this. Changing circumstances in the environment oblige us all to change our behaviour, and if we do not, our behaviour will change us. It will change our environment and the world around us; and not for the better! This is the constant law of ‘changing times’, and the natural law of all time. Global warming of the planet, and the rise of Covid-19, and its different strains that inevitably follow are merely the most recent of warnings to mankind. Take heed, please.

Love and peace. Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 6th January 2021

6/1/2021

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I dedicate today’s song to my friend Lewis Howcroft who lives in Guiseley, Leeds, West Yorkshire, and Conor Keane (area of residence not known). Both Lewis and Conor celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your special day.

My song today is ‘Halfway to Paradise’. This song was released by Billy Fury in the United Kingdom in 1961. The song became known as Fury's theme tune and remains one of his most popular singles. 
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I was 19 years old, and at the height of my teenage romantic years when this record was released by Billy Fury. Ever since the age of 15 years, I had planned to go live in Canada for a few years and travel around some of the U.S.A. when I was 21 years old. Because of a bad traffic accident, I incurred as a young boy aged 11 years, I had a sizable amount of compensation awarded to me, which would become due at my age of majority (21years). I must stress that I was brought up in an age when it was not unusual for a person to be born, live, and die within a ten-mile radius and that the farthest a working-class boy or girl might travel would be Blackpool; and that would be on a day outing and not the luxury of a week’s holiday. The only way that a working-class man might travel then, was if he joined the Army and was prepared to put his life on the line in order to see places abroad, he would otherwise never see.

The most common aspiration for all young men and women in the late 1950s and early 60s was to get married and to start a family of one’s own before they reached 22 years of age. Thereafter, daily life would become one of work, eat, shit, sleep, work, eat, shit and sleep, with the added variety of visiting one’s in-laws on a Sunday, where afternoon tea would be proudly served in once-a-week best china cups that invited sipping and discouraged slurping, accompanied by triangle-sliced sandwiches of potted meat, each part sandwich a perfect replica of the other five. Even the rationing of six part-sandwiches (two quarter-sandwiches for each guest and one-quarter of a sandwich each for the hosts) was a tradition carried over from the ‘Second World War’. 

The Sunday afternoon conversation at the in-law's house was always the same: “When are the two of you going to start a family?” These words would be spoken by one’s in-laws as if to constantly remind young married couples that the only purpose of them sharing the same bed was to bring another hungry mouth into the world to feed. No Sunday afternoon tea was ever had without the traditional mother-in-law sermon and father-in-law nod of obsequious spouse approval.     

As I approached the age of 21 years, I was determined not to follow the trend for the time and to get myself married before I had any chance to travel anywhere or see life beyond my back yard. The only fly in my romantic ointment was that I was forever ‘falling in love’, and while I loved the experience of ‘falling in love’, I did not want the responsibility of ‘being in love’. In short, I wanted my cake and eat it! The answer I arrived at was to keep my courtships brief to three or four dates and ending the relationship before either of us had the opportunity to become emotionally involved. I was a young man who was seeking nights of fun and romance with attractive young women, and nowhere was I in the market for any other committed relationship which brought me within a mile of marriage or the delicate eating of potted meat part-sandwiches on a Sunday afternoon!  

I was to a cocky and confident young man who was too full of himself ever to be left empty-handed whenever I wanted a good-looking woman on my arm to take to the dance or to sit on the back row of the cinema with. In truth, I would have to admit that I always enjoyed being 'the hunter' and never 'the pursued'. I needed the thrill of the chase, much more than any excitement of the catch. I was usually confident in the outcome whenever I pursued a girl’s favour. After all, when one thinks highly of themselves, they are less likely to let themselves down, and as far as I was concerned, I had everything going for me.

I was good looking, and I could sing, dance, and fight with the best of them. There was absolutely no reason why I would not be considered as being a good catch for any young woman on the lookout for a decent young man to marry. In many ways, they could not lose. I was as presentable a young man who they could always bring home for afternoon tea on a Sunday in the sure knowledge that mum and dad would approve by bringing out the best china.

That was the safe side of me that appealed to prospective in-laws. However, the young women I dated also knew another side of me, a more dangerous side.  They could sense aspects of my personality that their mums and dads would have been too streetwise to take at face value as being in their young daughter’s best interests. I was romantic, but I was also risky. I was educated and well-spoken, but I was streetwise to all common goings-on. I was industrious in nature, but too much of a play-boy and pleasure-seeker to settle down to a life of domesticity and daily drudgery, just to occasionally eat and drink from china crockery. I was obviously someone who would go far in life, but like any wild stallion who found themselves footloose and fancy-free, I could not disguise that wandering spirit within me that would resist all attempts to be rounded up and broken before I was ready to take life at a steadier trot instead of a gallop. Always within me lay a streak of unpredictability; a hint about me that excites and invites further investigation, yet both scares and attracts the opposite sex. The young women whom I dated would never know if they’d be sorry they tried to rope me in, or sad they hadn’t. 

When it comes to experiencing the satisfaction in one’s relationships, ironically, the thing about success, in whatever quarter it is pursued, the more one gets, the more one expects, and in time, the whole process becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the confidence of the actor continues to meet the expectation of the audience. I have always had a part to play in life, and I have never shied away from the many roles handed to me. Indeed, one might say that I have always found a stage somewhere, upon which to strut my stuff.

I was the most fortunate of young men, always to be courting somebody who was both a good dancer and a good looker. I can count on one hand, the Saturday nights when I did not walk a girl home at the end of the night. Walking allowed a young man the opportunity to ‘get to know the girl better’ before I agreed to see her at next week’s dance or take her to the picture show at the cinema during the week. My trouble was that I had too much going for me, as I was as popular with the gang of mates I went around with as I was with the women on and off the dance floor. Until I went to Canada and America at the age of 21  years, I could never decide what I enjoyed the most; a good old brawl between one rival gang and another (a weekly event) or a romantic stroll down a country lane with a beautiful young woman who fancied me as much as I fancied her. Either way, most of my weekends attending the Cleckheaton Town Hall would end up either fighting down a dark alley or courting in one as I escorted my date for the night back home. 

I had never been found wanting in the good-looks department, and by the early age of 15 years, even my next two sisters could see the wind of favour blowing my way. By the age of 15 years, I looked ‘cute’, but by the time I had reached 18 years of age, I could easily have been a stand-in for the film star, James Dean, with my wild ways, my suggestive smile, and my manly-looks-in-the-making. Indeed, apart from his money, I had more going for me and I considered myself more talented than James Dean. Whereas his fights on the screen were ‘make-believe’ ones with some poor stand-in taking his punches on the chin while he took his money, smirking all the way to the bank, my fights always involved personal pain, the loss of blood, the fracture or breakage of bones (either mine or my opponents), with the ‘Belt of Pride’ or the ‘Walk of Shame’ as the ultimate presentation of peer approval/disapproval. 

Other advantages I had over James Dean was that I was a much better singer, my fighting prowess kept me popular with my peer group, I could bop with the best of them, and I exuded confidence in everything I did. I also spoke perfectly in Queens English and did not drawl or mumble my words in some American slang. However, more important than anything else, I had good fortune and lady luck on my side. We both had horrific vehicle accidents, but there the similarities ended. He was driving his own car too fast when he crashed and killed himself, while I was innocently playing football on the street when a large wagon ran over me and almost left me for dead.

With an abundance of good looks, sufficient dancing skills, singing talent, and being popular with my peer group (male and females), I was always ‘Halfway to Paradise’, besides getting the occasional access to the vaults of feminine heaven.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 5th January 2021

5/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to five birthday celebrants. They are Jacqui Fitzgerald Meagher and Lena Fitzergerald from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary: Pascal Mansfield who lives in Clonmel, Tipperary: Caroline Diamond who lives in Bradford, West Yorkshire and Mary Williams from Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A.  Enjoy your special day, Jacqui, Lena, Pascal, Caroline, and Mary. Thank you for being my Facebook friend, ladies.

My song today is ‘Copperhead Road’. This song was written and recorded by American country music artist, Steve Earle. It was released in 1988. The song reached Number 10 on the U.S. Billboard ‘Mainstream Rock Tracks Chart’ and was Earle's highest-peaking song to date in the United States. 

The song's narrator is named John Lee Pettimore III, whose father and grandfather were both active in moonshine making and bootlegging in rural Johnson County in Tennessee. Pettimore's grandfather visited the town rarely, when he wanted to buy supplies for an illegal still he had set up in a hollow along 'Copperhead Road'. Pettimore's father hauled the moonshine to Knoxville each week in an old police cruiser he bought at a surplus auction. According to a family story, a ‘Revenue Man’ once confronted John Sr. on 'Copperhead Road', intent on apprehending him for his moonshine activities. The Revenue man never returned. John Jr. Pettimore himself was killed in a fiery car crash on the same road while driving to Knoxville with a weekly shipment. To avoid arrest, Pettimore enlists in the Army on his birthday, believing he will soon be drafted, and serves two tours of duty in Vietnam. Once he returns home, he decides to use the 'Copperhead Road' land to grow marijuana, using seeds from Colombia and Mexico. He resolves not to be caught by the DEA and sets up booby traps, similar to those employed by the Viet Cong. 

'Copperhead Road' was an actual road near Mountain City in Tennessee. It runs through an area once known to locals as ‘Big Dry Run, although it has since been renamed ‘Copperhead Hollow Road’, owing to the theft of road signs bearing the song's name. The song also inspired a popular line dance, timed to the same beat, and has been used as the theme music for the ‘Discovery Channel’ reality series called ‘Moonshiners’. 

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 4th January 2021

4/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants. First, we wish a happy birthday to Kaz Langley (Karen). Karen lives in Mirfield, West Yorkshire with her three children. She is the lifelong friend of my daughter, Rebecca, and the ex-partner of my son, Adam, and the mother of my granddaughter, Olivia. Just to keep my birthday greetings in the family (so to speak), I also wish a happy birthday to Josefine Pavelsen whose parents live in Stockholm, Sweden. Josefin is the ex-partner of my son, William, and like William, she appears to be a lifelong backpacker and a free spirit. Finally, we wish a happy birthday to the classical pianist, Bill Whitfield. Bill lives in Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.A. His beautiful piano playing pleasures the lives of so many across the globe, including mine. The one thing which combines all three birthday celebrants today is that they are all very much their own people. Kaz, Josefin, and Bill, enjoy your special day.

My song today is ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’. This song was co-written and recorded by Canadian singer Shania Twain. It was released in December 1998. The song was written by Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange and Twain and was originally released to North American country radio stations in late 1998. It became her third biggest single on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ and remains one of Twain's biggest hits worldwide. ‘That Don't Impress Me Much’ has appeared in all of Twain tours. The country version was performed on the ‘Come on Over Tour’ and the dance version on the Up! Tour. ‘That Don't Impress Me Much’ was named ‘Foreign Hit of the Year’ at the ‘2000 Danish Grammy Awards’.

The song describes three self-absorbed suitors with whom Twain, as the title implies, is not impressed: a know-it-all ("Okay, so you're a rocket scientist"): a man obsessed with his looks ("Okay, so you're Brad Pitt”): and another obsessed with his car ("Okay, so you've got a car"). Twain states that brains, looks, and the car "won't keep (her) warm in the middle of the night" and seeks a man with "the touch" that can do so.

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When I was first married in 1968, I was at the stage of being socially mobile in a seemingly upwards direction. At the young age of 26 years, I was a Mill Manager on the night shift earning over double the average salary. I started married life with a teacher wife, and with 90 percent of a new three-bedroomed detached house that cost £4.400 paid for. I was also planning to take a university degree in History after I had gained my university qualifications at three years of night school classes. I planned to teach history to secondary school pupils. I was a handsome young man of good intelligence, in robust health, and the world was my oyster, just waiting to be opened.

In the crescent behind our matrimonial house was twenty new-build semis, in which lived five newly married couples next door to each other. Over the next ten years, we would all become close friends. Ours was the only detached house in the crescent and being almost mortgage-free the day we married placed us in an enviable position for any young married couple from working-class stock. Our money for our house purchase came from two accidents that yielded each of us compensation; myself when I was run over by a wagon at the age of 11 years, and my wife’s compensation for being the child of a man who had died from industrial cancer.

The era when we married was known as ‘keeping up with the Jones’ time. We six crescent couples socialised together a few times a week, and it could be said that we finished up living in each other’s pockets as we became the closest of friends. The six husbands would drink together at the local pub on a Thursday night while the six wives would gather in one house and entertain themselves until supper time, after which the men would have returned from the pub. The men’s arrival would be the cue to taste whatever delicious food spread that weeks’ hostess had prepared for our discerning and critical palates. As the hostess received the highest of false praise from her house guests for having prepared such a sumptuous fare she had reportedly ‘thrown together’ in a few hours that afternoon, the men would commence some serious conversation which was designed to change the world, and the twelve of us would talk ‘intelligently’ until the early morning hours.

Meanwhile, the poor hostess (who had spent all week preparing her secret ‘thrown together’ supper) would be thinking of still being up at 3:00 am, before she got to bed after washing and tidying everything away. It was no good the hostess expecting her poor tired husband to assist, as he would be fast asleep in bed snoring his head off five minutes after the last house guest had left, making manly noises loud enough to frighten the downstairs’ dogsbody and dishwasher. After all, the poor husband had played his part to perfection that night. Having placed the responsibility on his wife of cooking a meal that would be remembered and spoken about for months after, all he was required to do as ‘man of the house’ was to gratefully receive the plaudits from his house guests for having married ‘such a good cook’. Such praise was usually intended, understood, and accepted as a ‘double entendre’, as each of the six sexy wives could have easily been picked from a fashion parade of models strutting the catwalk.

As well as taking turns to entertain on Thursday evenings as well as providing sit-down food for a dozen people once a month, we would also eat out at as a group at a good restaurant once a month, and we would usually go dancing once a week. We also holidayed for two weeks every year for the first six years of our friendship, before the first of our children came along. We were all able to keep up with this high standard of living because of our professional jobs, our good monthly salaries, and because none of us (apart from me) wanted to start a family until our seventh year of marriage. They wanted to make sure that no ‘seven-year itch’ would disturb their cosy marriage existence as they intended to give it a bloody great scratch! In short, they had all settled for living the ‘high life’ and to hell with putting the ‘married life’ on hold until the physical and monetary resources had been greatly dissipated and a more serene and settled life would be advocated by the doctor.

It is difficult for people today to grasp how shallow were the values of the middle-class households in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many evenings would be considered as being ‘socially stimulating’ to entertain half a dozen over a sit-down meal and a few bottles of decent wine, and where the conversation would always come around to the very same subjects as the group discussed the previous time they'd met. Such stimulating subjects included the rising cost of houses: the profit we had all made on the house we lived in since we’d initially bought it: how expensive and functional our new dining table or suite was: the nature of the expensive indoor wallpaper we had hung in the loo: the price of the new oven and the bargain we had managed to get by beating down the aggressive salesman: or what type of motor car we would be getting when we next exchanged vehicles. It is no surprise that one of the well-remembered ‘Plays for Today’ on B.B.C. in the 1970s was ‘Abigail’s Party’; devised and directed in 1977 by Mike Leigh. This play showed the snobbishness that still prevailed in the lives of those socially-upward mobile individuals who an aunt of mine would often describe as ‘mutton dressed up as lamb!”

It shames me today to think that though I always was out of step with my new marriage friends, and never truly fitted in with the ‘in-crowd’, I nevertheless allowed myself to be prepared to follow their way of life for my first seven years of marriage. It wasn’t until after I became a Probation Officer and allowed myself to see the superficiality of such an existence, that I began to rail against the shallow materialism that we were all drowning in as the whirlpool of our commonly practised values, dragged us lower and lower.

I became the ‘rebel of the group’, and my first wife would even apologise on my behalf whenever we got together at each other’s houses, even before I had verbally objected to some social, sexual, disabled, or racially discriminatory comment by one of the group.

The bottom line was that what once impressed me no longer did. I was now instantly repulsed, and I found myself returning to my core working-class values which I had previously thought I had left behind upon my marriage to a teacher who had come from working-class stock with middle-class pretensions. This change ‘back to my roots’ and my refusal to continue with ‘my new way of life’ became a marital wedge that split us up as soon as our two children were born. Before the children had started their first school, my wife wanted us to separate and divorce. Within a few years of my divorce, five of the six crescent couples had divorced, and they all went their different middle-class ways.

As for me, I deeply resisted and regretted the ending of my marriage at the time, but once having left it, I knew that our breakup was inevitable, and was for the best. I had opened my eyes once more to the gross inequality, unfairness, poverty, and rottenness of ‘materialism’ and ‘financial aspiration’. I have often heard it said that sometimes a person needs to be broken down before they can be properly rebuilt. That was certainly true as far as I was concerned.

The remaining years of my life concerned the reconstruction of my own character into a mind, body, and soul that was at peace with its unified whole. This is still a project in the making, but hopefully, the passing of each day brings me one step closer to being the good person my Maker intended me to be.

Now that I think about ‘image’ and ‘impressions’, it fascinates me to think about the extent people are prepared to go to impress another/others. My advice to such social climbers today would be to always put one’s best foot forward, not to impress others but to impress self and enhance self-respect. One always impresses more by one’s appropriate actions than one’s words.
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When I think back to my shallow life of the early 70s, and before I became a Probation Officer, I shudder to think about the money we wasted on buying things to socially impress and to elevate our position as a newly married couple on the up-and-up in the ‘gang of gross gullibility’.

Over the years, I have grown more comfortable in my own skin, and I have learned to like more the person I have become. I am not perfect, nor ever could be, but what I lack in perfection, I make up for in humanity. Very few people are held in awe by me, and the ones who are most likely live next door to you and me. I have learned to compete fiercely in most of life's activities but to lose graciously. I have always taken the side of the underdog, and nothing pleases me more than to see a person of small stature take command in a huge arena. Most of us are impressed when the small person stands tall, stands proud, and stands up for what they believe in!

There are lots of things which might have once turned my head but today ‘don’t impress me much’. I have often wondered, “If the whole world was blind, how many people would we be able to impress then?” Then I ask myself “What would it take to impress a blind person?” I now know that being able to express our love is the most impressive thing of all and that our need to genuinely touch another (as the current pandemic virus has taught us) is more important than ever to our continuing comfort and constant sanity.

Love and peace Bill xxx

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HAPPY HEAVENLY BIRTHDAY FRANCIS WILLIAM GAMBLE - 4th January 2021

4/1/2021

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Today has been a day for coincidences. This morning my birthday celebrations went to the ex-partners of two of my sons, William, and Adam. Then tonight, I had a message from my cousin John’s wife, Lynne who informed me of more coincidences related to today. Let me first say that the father of my cousin, John (Lynn Ford’s husband), and my father were brothers. In fact, I am named after John’s father, (Billy).

Lynne told me that today would have been her father’s 92nd birthday. Her father was called Francis William Gamble. I am called William and I have a son is called William Francis. Lynne told me that when she first met my extended family in West Yorkshire, she was surprised to learn that my brother Peter’s wife was called Linda Gamble prior to her marriage to a Forde also. The coincidences did not stop there either, between Lynne and Linda. Both had brain surgery operations performed on them during the same year. Lynne had an aneurism and Linda had something similar. 

Lynne also informed me that her sister, Luz Venables shares the same birthday as myself, November 10th. Here is another coincidence, Lynne of which you are unaware, and which you have just made me aware. The day your dear father died was the very same day, month, and year that Sheila and I first met in Haworth. December 15th, 2010.

When I met my wife, Sheila, I told her very early on in our relationship that she and I were destined to meet where and when we did. She told me that she had always believed in astrology and that the positions of planetary forces affected our journey through life and our destiny. I was prepared to accept this at face value as too many uncanny details had peppered my life such as myself as the oldest child of seven siblings being born to a mother who was also the oldest child of seven siblings. Even in matters of romance, my life remains a conundrum of coincidences, an enigma of sweet serendipity. A few examples will suffice here. My first and second wives had their birthdays on the same days of the year. The first love of my life (Jenny Downton in Canada) and the last love of my life (my wife Sheila) both shared the same birthday, November 29th.

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In mathematics, two angles that are said to coincide fit together perfectly. The word ‘coincidence’ does not describe luck or mistakes. It describes that which fits together perfectly. In essence, I have never believed in ‘coincidences’ and I cannot conceive of ‘meaningless coincidence’. I believe every coincidence is a message and a clue about a particular facet of our lives that requires our attention. As the Indian/American author and alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra remarked that in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. He advocates that nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen or it is meant to happen.

My favourite thought of all on coincidences comes from the greatest mind of all time, Albert Einstein who said, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Have a happy heavenly birthday, Francis William Gamble. Here is a song that is one hundred years old, 'Sonny Boy'. 

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 3rd January 2021

3/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to four birthday celebrants. We wish a happy birthday to Joe Pointon who lives in Skipton, West Yorkshire, and also Michael Kelly who lives in Haworth, West Yorkshire. We also wish a happy birthday to Debbie Gibbs who lives in Keighley. Debbie celebrates her 50th birthday today. Finally, birthday greetings go to Charles W. Abbott, who lives in Rochester, New York. Enjoy your special day, Joe, Michael, Debbie, and Charles. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ’Diary’. This song was written and produced by David Gates and released by his band ‘Bread’ in 1972. It spent 11 weeks on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart, peaking at No. 15 while reaching Number 3 on ‘Billboard’s Easy Listening’ chart.

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Most of us use a diary these days to jot down important occasions, addresses, or birthday reminders. They tend to be used more by women than men, but that is more of a historic throwback to the Victorian times when diary use was more prominent in the bedrooms of women and girls as opposed to the writing desks of some men, but with several significant exceptions. Many authors and politicians, preachers, and cooks would use diaries. Such famous diarists included William Cobbett: Samuel Pepys: Anne Frank: Isabella Mary Beeton, and the rather less well-known, Adelaide Pountney.

Like all good diaries, Adelaide Pountney's ‘The Diary of a Victorian Lady’ provide written scenes from two years of her Daily Life (1864-1865). The diary gives its readers the chance to imagine the life of its author between the lines. Such diary entries include the daily round of walks and shopping, visiting the homes of others, churchgoing, homemaking, and charity work.

There were many famous people who became poets, writers, and diarists of ‘World War 1’. Many of them would often first note their ideas, observations, and witnessed experiences in a small pocket diary which would be later written up more fully. Such famous scribblers/poets/ writers included people like Wilfred Owen: Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke to name but a few.

Keeping a diary has been a practice of many women ever since Victorian times. Often, with women being regarded as second-class citizens to their menfolk throughout all Victorian classes, the middle classes females, along with those women from the upper classes would invariably keep a dairy that was literally locked to prevent the contents from being seen by anyone other than the author of the diary. Prior to the late 1930s, women were generally discouraged by the male society of publicly expressing their view in the company of others as such practice was considered ‘impolite’ and ‘unladylike’ for women to worry their pretty little minds upon a wide range of serious topics like religion, politics, and topics of war. Such matters were best left to their menfolk to discuss and deal with while ‘the little woman’ ran the home in the absence of her marital master. Living in such restrictive times, the only way a woman could express her opinions and views was if she kept them in her private diary. In many ways, it was a secret practice of silently expressing the feminine viewpoint.

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My dear friend, Etta Denton, who acted as my substituted mother when my own mother died in the mid-1980s (and who lived to 94 years of age before she too died in the late 1990s), was the perfect example of a polite lady diarist. Etta was born at the turn of the century into the working-class home of strict Methodist parents; a time when the Victorian Age gave way to Edwardian society. Etta kept a diary (indeed, many diaries) between her teenage years up until a few weeks before she died. She was a clever woman who was widely read, but like many girls of her time, education was seen as an experience for the better-class male student. She started working in the mill as a girl of barely fifteen but had to give it up when her disabled mother became bedridden. From her twentieth year of life until her 70th year, Etta worked as a full-time carer to a bedridden mother. She also undertook additional roles as a housekeeper to her father and brother, and a general dog’s body and servant to all. After her mother died, Etta remained a housekeeper to her father and bachelor brother until he also died. In short, apart from a few years of millwork in her mid-teenage years, Etta experienced no normal childhood, and it was only in her 70Safter both parents and brother had died before Etta became free to pursue her own life.

Etta remained a spinster throughout her long life, and the only love she ever had beyond reading her books, studying her bible, and playing her piano on a Sunday afternoon was a soldier sweetheart who she secretly met and saw on a Sunday afternoon for an hour. Her parents would never have tolerated Etta seeing any man, especially after her mother became bedbound. She was too valuable a family asset to lose to a marriage union with any man. Hence all contact with young men was discouraged and deeply frowned upon. Her continued spinsterhood was essential to the smooth functioning of the parental home. Etta had been brought up in the strict Methodist tradition and remained highly obedient to parental wishes which she would never have openly defied. Indeed, the only secret she ever kept from her parents and brother was the love of her young man who she saw briefly and secretly every Sunday afternoon. She knew that was that knowledge to be known to her father, she would have been turned out of the family home. For over one year, Etta wrestled with an uneasy conscience as she continued to deceive her parents about her Sunday afternoon walks ‘alone’ while she would secretly meet up with her man friend.

Etta and her sweetheart would meet on a Sunday afternoon where they would snatch the briefest of time together. Crunch time appeared on the horizon when he was called up to serve as a soldier overseas in the ‘Second World War’. The couple was in love with each other, and they made a secret pact to marry after the war was over, whether Etta’s parent’s approved or not. Her soldier sweetheart would post his letters to Etta from the front line via Etta’s lifelong friend, Mary Milner. Mary had worked at the same mill as Etta when they were young women, and she left to marry her husband around the same time as Etta had to give up the mill job to care for her bed-bound mother, father, and bachelor brother.

For the first two years of war, Mary Milner (unknown to her husband) would act as ‘go-between’ post mistress and post man regarding her friend’s love letters to and from her soldier sweetheart. Not daring to risk-taking her sweetheart’s letters home with her, Etta would read them at Mary’s house; then after committing as much as she could to memory, she would burn them. When she arrived back home, she would then transcribe as much of what she could remember from her sweetheart’s letter into her diary, which she locked, and which never left her bedroom. During the week ahead, and before her next visit to see her friend, Mary Milner, Etta would write a letter of reply to her soldier sweetheart and Mary would post it on her behalf.

Sadly, Etta’s soldier sweetheart died during the war, and though Etta was extremely saddened by her loss, it was a loss that she had to carry alone. Only she and her friend Mary knew about the secret relationship with her soldier sweetheart. Indeed, Mary Milner would not even dare tell her husband that she acted as ‘go-between’ for Etta and her sweetheart soldier, knowing that he would have strongly disapproved and prevented her from continuing to see Etta if he ever found out. Like many women in her situation after the war, Etta could not officially mourn the loss of her secret soldier sweetheart, or even visit his grave. Being a spinster, she was left to grieve alone in the privacy of her own sorrow and bedroom. Etta’s friend, Mary Milner, died almost ten years before her older friend. One month before Etta died, I stayed at her house during the day and slept there every night once we knew from the doctor that she had not long left to live. We were like mother and son, ever since the start of our relationship. Being forever fearful of her one day having to enter an old folk’s home, I promised Etta early on in our relationship that she would be accommodated at my house with my family before I would ever allow that to happen. Apart from one surviving niece, Etta had nobody else whom she viewed as being family, and knowing in advance of her death that she would never become the reluctant resident of an old folk’s home, provided her with the only reassurance she ever needed from me.

During her last two weeks of life, Etta revealed to me for the first time, her love for her soldier sweetheart and how she had been obliged to keep their association secret from her family and the rest of the world. She revealed his name to have been ‘Bill’ (the same name as mine), and occasionally when she talked about him, she would refer to one of her many diaries in which she wrote about him or something he had said to her. In her last week of life, Etta asked me to fetch her a book upstairs to her bedroom from the oak book cabinet in her lounge. She asked me to open the book at a certain page, and when I did, I found a pressed flower which Bill had given her over fifty years earlier before he was called up to serve in the war.

When Etta died, I arranged for her funeral and administered her estate. I also ensured that inside her closed coffin, placed in her hand, was the pressed flower that her sweetheart Bill had given her before he became a soldier and died fighting for his country. There was only one place suitable for her private thoughts, so I also ensured that her most personal diaries were placed beside her in her coffin so that she would have something loving to read as soon as she arrived in heaven. Mum Etta left me her old house and its contents, and I kept one of her earlier diaries for myself. This was a diary that has no mention of Bill in it and pertains to her sixtieth year of life onwards. God rest her soul. I love you, Etta Denton.
Your adopted son Bill xxx

PS: After Etta’s death, I wrote a poem of the love she felt for her soldier sweetheart, Bill, along with all the other single women who lost soldier sweethearts in the war, and because they were not officially engaged or married were left to mourn their loss alone, as Etta had. My dear late friend, Vera Lynn encouraged me to publish it more widely one day. It is entitled, ‘Arthur and Guinevere’ as Etta and Bill’s love for each other turned out to be ‘the love that could not be’, just like the Knight, Lancelot, and Queen Guinevere of Camelot.

http://www.fordefables.co.uk/arthur--guinevere.html
Love and peace Bill xxx


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ANOTHER PART OF MY PAST DIES WITH GERRY MARSDEN: 3RD, JANUARY 2021.

3/1/2021

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Today, Gerry Marsden of 'Gerry and the Pacemakers' died aged 78 years. He taught millions of fans nationwide that they need never walk alone. Rest in peace Gerry.
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Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 2nd January 2021

2/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to Paul Kerns who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey. It is Paul’s birthday today, although the present which would make him the happiest is to be able to physically share his special day with his wife Pat, whom he was married to for almost fifty years before she sadly died in March 2017. 

Paul and Pat were that married couple which all newlyweds embarking on married life together aspire to become. Every married couple intends our vows to last forever, but sadly that is not the case with over half of us. For those couples, like Pat and Paul, their love is eternal and the bond they formed together when they wed cannot be broken, even by the passing of one of them to the other side of the green sod. 

Rest assured, Paul, that Pat will be looking down on you today. The first breeze past you will be her spiritual kiss, and that increased pressure in the palm of your hand is hers entwined with yours as she holds hands with you once more, and that skipped heart-beat is but a brief memory of the first time you looked into each other’s eyes and spoke those magic words, “I Love you, Pat” and she replied, “I love you too, Paul”. Pat is with you today and all the remaining days before you, Paul. She never left you. The love you two had together never died. It lasts ‘Longer than time itself’. Indeed, it is such love as expressed by one human to another that makes the earth turn on its axis of wedded eternity. This song was selected and sung especially for you, Paul. We have never met, but the love of your dear wife is evident to even a stranger across the Atlantic Ocean. Thank you for being my Facebook friend and enjoy your special day. Bill.

My song today is ‘Longer Than’. This song was written and recorded by the American singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg. Released as a single in late 1979, the song became Dan Fogelberg's highest-charting hit of his career, reaching the Number 2 spot on the ‘in March 1980. 

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Eternity means ‘longer than time can imagine’, and time was never a boundary that acted as a barrier between Pat and Paul whom we think of today. When two people are deeply in love with each other, their love will endure even lengthy periods apart. True love is only grounded in hearts that are prepared to return with interest the love the other deposits there. When two people are destined to be together, love gives them their first taste of eternal bliss; their physical and spiritual being become inextricably blended, and an insight into the heaven of each other is retained when they pass from this life to the next. Their journey together starts at ‘forever’ and only ends at ‘never’. 

Everything and everyone around two people who are passionately in the throes of love will innocently pass them by, for they exist in an orbit and an eternity of love that remains as constant as their open hearts with eyes for no other. The way we know that love is ‘true’ is when it seeks nothing in return, for it exists in a space that can only be measured by the rule of the heart. It is the one thing mankind is prepared to sacrifice all for, the one thing that allows us on earth to dwell closer to paradise. 

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Special Request: 1st January 2021

1/1/2021

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SPECIAL REQUEST BY SHARON PARKER BYRNE: 'NOBODY'S CHILD'.

Sharon Parker Byrne of Carlow in southern Ireland requests the song 'Nobody's Child' for her family who is going through a very bad patch at the moment. Her brother Martin is very ill and she would like him cheering up along with his wife Jenny. Also, her sister, Mairéad is fighting a big battle in the nursing home she's running, in which 90% of residents and staff are down with Covid-19. I understand that the song I sing at her request was one of her dear mother's favourite songs. May the New Year, 2021 bring you and your family a better year. I also dedicate this song to any child in care and without parental support.

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 1st January 2021

1/1/2021

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I include two songs to start off this New Year’s Day. Today, I place my mind and focus on three areas. 

First, we wish a happy birthday to Marian McBride who lives in Newbridge, Kildare, Ireland. We also extend birthday greetings to John Kelly Waterford who lives in Waterford, Ireland, and Ellen Barrett. I hope that Marian, John, and Ellen enjoy their special day and that the coming year bodes well for them, and their families.

Many of you like me will have unfortunately experienced the death of family members and close friends over the past year. My sincere condolences go out to all of you in your loss. There have been seven people whose bereavement I have felt, but four of them in particular. 

I have lost two family members, one best friend, and one long-term friend.  In April 2020, (Mark Walsworth) the partner to my niece, Sam Swales died from Covid-19 aged 50 years. The family unit had moved from West Yorkshire up to Aberdeen a few months earlier to start life afresh. In July 2020, Sheila’s brother and only sibling, Winston, (62 years) died during a prolonged period of depression following an unwanted marital separation and divorce. Winston and Sheila found it impossible to obtain the psychiatric help he required, and tragically, Winston killed himself during a Lockdown period. A month earlier in June 2020, my best friend, Tony Walsh, who lived in Tipperary, Ireland sadly died. We had known each other for over fifty years since being teenagers. Around the same time, my late mother’s favourite singer and a good friend of mine over the past thirty years, Dame Vera Lynn, died aged 103. With the passing of these four people, we lost a part of our family, a cherished part of my childhood experiences, and early memories of my mother singing along with Vera Lynn’s voice on the radio as the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ continued to lift the nation’s spirits after the ‘Second World War’. This past year has tragically touched the lives of so many people. Until they meet again.
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Given the nature of the year we have all just lived through, we have all had it hard, and some have unfortunately had it tougher than others. While parts of the country have kept millions of citizens separated from their loved ones and family during Lockdowns across the land, there have been thousands of others who have had to grieve the permanent loss of a loved one to either Covid-19 or some other illness which has killed them before their time. Because of government restrictions of movement and other freedoms in a bid to control both populace and virus, many dozens of small yet important things we previously took for granted were denied us during our daily lives. 

For much of the past seventy years, since the end of the 'Second World War',  the world had turned on its steady axis of small alteration until recent climate warnings began to loom large, alongside economic stringencies and the implementation of more austere political programmes of different governments. Then, just as the world started to face an economic turnabout for the better, and life started to seem smoother, along came this pernicious pandemic virus that cast its deadly shroud of grief and death across the globe like a grim reaper of eternal gloom. 

Before mankind had even time to think what was happening, the earth suddenly spun into mass uncertainty, economic collapse, and political meltdown as deathly fear and damaging doubt were sown. Before long, the ‘official news’ was being directly challenged by the ‘conspiracist theorists’, (and aided by an army of both educated and educationally illiterate social media trolls) each camp of 'fixed opinion' accused the other doing their fellow man down. According to those who did not believe the government of the day (whichever country they lived in) government propaganda supported by dubious establishment figures, no-nothing scientists, wildly inaccurate and unsubstantiated statistics, along with deliberate deceit was being used to control the populous. Numbers of people remaining with an ounce of objectivity grew fewer and fewer until even they started to doubt whether the emperor was clothed or naked? Even the proclaimed life-saving vaccine to recently be approved for public distribution was being rubbished and relabelled by some disapprovers as being a dangerous, deadly, and a D.N.A-altering substance!

Meanwhile, as these two ‘intelligence camps’ continued to actively agitate against ‘the facts‘ that each of them was putting out, the lives of ordinary people all around them were being ruined beyond redemption. People died directly from Covid-19 and others died because Covid-19 worsened an already vulnerable underlying illness or condition of theirs. Others died because Covid-19 was prioritised in our hospitals above other potentially fatal conditions and illnesses that had to take second place in the bed queue. 

Whatever the reason, more people died, and many more people were left to grieve their loved ones with the knowledge that they could not be at their bedside during their final moments to hold their hands and console them. Even after their death, the bereaved were further pained when they were even denied providing a proper burial and send off for them on the day of their funeral service.

As well as all the above, businesses went bust, millions of jobs were lost, debt spiralled, bankruptcies became more common as houses were repossessed, national depression deepened, suicides increased, and many marriages broke up that might otherwise have survived. And amid all this misery mounting up around the many countries of the world, innocent lovers were kept apart, marriages were unable to take place and courting couples were expected to wash their hands whenever they broke the courtship code of ‘no-touch romance’ and failed to keep their ‘amorous advances‘ at the recommended safe distance of two metres.

Let us hope that in the New Year common sense and mutual trust can once more break out between the two Covid-2021 camps of opposing opinion, and just as the divided country has had to come to terms with Brexit, so, I suspect, it will also have to reconcile itself with future expectations relating to vaccine use, propriety, and efficacy. 

For all of you, I hope that you each will be able to find ‘Someplace: Somehow: Someday: Somewhere’ where love, peace of mind, and a happy reunion with deceased loved ones can be experienced once more. 

Happy New Year and Love and Peace to you all.
​Bill and Sheila xxx
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