Blog Archives - FordeFables

January 31st, 2016

31/1/2016

Thought for today:
"Children find all aspects of nature fascinating and all manner of activity fun in the making, whether it be jumping in puddles, having mud baths, chasing rainbows or making a wish to a full moon in the dark of night.They are fascinated by all creatures large and small, particularly creatures with wings, whether fictional or factual. They love slimey snakes that slither through the long grass and frogs whom they love to squeeze until their eyes bulge. They delight in the touch of sticking their finger into a bowl of jelly, scraping out the jam jar or stroking the hide of an elephant. Watching a blacksmith shoe a horse makes them cringe in fearful anticipation as the nails are hammered into the hoof. While most children love all manner of pet creature, boys have a particular fondness for rats with long tails who are known to make friends so easily with any human who is prepared to house them in their shirt pocket and hold them close to their heart. They also love the look of shock they can produce upon the face of innocent girls whenever they take out their pet rat from beneath their clothes and swing it in front of their noses.
The thing that fascinates me most about children is their capacity to trust all manner of things strange and their willingness to interact with it within minutes of first acquaintance, as though they'd been life long friends. Children live in a world of magic that adults once had but lost. They find magic in all they see because they look for it, just like witnessing a caterpillar in the belly of a match box turn into a butterfly. They seek magic in stolen moments that others have abandoned. They can still feel that something is magical, even when they know how it's done, and feeling a hidden baby in the making inside mum's pregnant tummy is the most magical experience of all! When asking, 'How will it get out, Mum', replying,' 'The same way it got in!' will never satisfy their height of inquisitiveness.

If only adults could harness the magic of a child for the benefit of mankind, the world would turn more smoothly and spin in equal favour of all. We would then be able to refashion the world today through their indiscriminate eyes of innocence, employing their thoughts of purity and hearts of compassion in all we did. We would establish a humane code of conduct and lay down expectations that all would willingly ascribe to and follow. We would first feed, house, clothe and protect every man woman and child on the planet before going out to play!" William Forde: January 31st, 2016.

January 30th, 2016.

30/1/2016

Thought for today:
"'I wonder; if I keep my head down and stay quiet, will the trouble go away?'

I cannot count the number of times I have seen this thought float across the face of a dog or cat who knows they have done wrong. Alas. it is often harder to identify by look in a human, but is more easily recognised in their overall pattern of behaviour.

Then I started to think about all manner of 'avoiders.' Twenty five years as a Probation Officer taught me very early on that only those people who are prepared to open their eyes, face life head on and acknowledge their situation and behaviour, are capable of making positive change. For the past forty years I have studied human behaviour, and for twenty five of them I researched the three response patterns we each predominantly display; non-assertive, aggressive or appropriately assertive.

There is within each of us a bodily electro-chemical mechanism which involuntarily produces the response of fight or flight. This is designed to preserve the safety of the body by making it automatically select the form of action to engage in during the presence of danger that will keep us safe. For example, if we see a runaway truck heading straight towards us, without thinking, our body takes flight and automatically jumps out of the way to avoid a collision and remain safe. Or, if a mad man with a knife approaches us and seems determined to harm us and we cannot get away and avoid the threat, we automatically fight for our life.

There is however one type of person whose behaviour has led them to always seek to take the easier way out of trouble; the avoider. They do this by never getting into it; by avoiding all possibility of experiencing trouble and unpleasantness at every opportunity! Through constant repetition of this unnatural and unhealthy behaviour pattern which they reinforce over the years, they simply stop fighting their corner, they give way to the opinions and sway of the other person and forever feel unworthy as a consequence!They become one of the non-assertive people in society; the quiet ones who never say boo to a goose and who remain lacking in confidence, self respect and the ability to express their anger outside their own person.

Just who are these 'avoiders' and what are the ultimate consequences they face as the result of not expressing their true feelings, particularly those aspects of life that angers them?

In the continuum from the more harmless to grave, this is how they are best recognised. The non-assertive person learns to avoid all risk of unpleasantness early on and because of their constant need to please others at the expense of themselves, they present no threat to anyone and are liked by all; that is everyone except themselves! They hate to argue and rarely disagree, even when they do!

They always express liking the gifts of others which in reality they may dislike intensely, so as to avoid offence being caused. They are the spouse who is too fearful to tell their partner that they would prefer to eat Christmas dinner at home this year instead of mother-in-laws, but dare not say so. They avoid honestly expressing their anger and reduce such feelings to the rating of disappointment at best. They lack self confidence and constantly seek the love and reassurance of others. They give others copious compliments while at the same time putting themselves down.

As their avoidance behaviour becomes more entrenched in their overall response pattern, it becomes more automatic, until the time comes when they find that they cannot respond otherwise. Everything in their world is fake; their responses in social situations, their compliments, their pretend happiness. The sad truth is that while others may have been led to believe 'this' about them, the reality is 'that.'

They become more prone towards depression, are more likely to take pills or turn to the bottle of evening wine and are less likely to feel like socialising. They often bury their heads in the sand and busy themselves by overinvesting their time in their work or the lives of others (often a family member or close friend), instead of their own!

Unfortunately, all avoiders, though they may attempt to keep the truth from others, they cannot avoid knowing it themselves. Whereas others perceive their pretend happiness with life, only they know their real sadness. In the most extreme case of the non-assertiveness response, the person is more likely to self harm, kill self or even others, if their mind becomes unhinged!

The reason for this is that all the hurt they naturally feel and never expressed over the years is repressed deep within. Over time it builds up and up inside them and because the non-assertive person doesn't display the safety valve of expressing of their anger, their anger implodes first and then involuntarily explodes onto the outside world from which it has so long hidden. At the point of implosion, the subject becomes emotionally distraught and often psychiatrically disturbed.

Occasionally, our television screens may report a man who calmly arrived home from work, washed his face, cleaned the dishes and then after going into his garage and loading a shotgun, he returned to the house and shot dead his wife, child and pet dog before turning the gun on himself! When asked about their neighbour who'd committed such offences by the television presenters, the neighbour's responses would reveal the behaviour to be totally out of character with the lovely man they always knew ( thought they knew).

They would describe their neighbour as having been the kindest of neighbours, polite, courteous and generous to the core, a good family man who loved his wife and child to bits; a man who cleaned his car regularly, was never once heard to raised his voice to man or beast and who went to church every Sunday and kept his lawn meticulously tidy.

It might later be revealed that the man had been made redundant from his work that day after twenty eight years as a loyal employee of the firm. He just could not face the prospect of being unemployed, of telling his wife that he'd lost his job and that they'd have to move house as well as cancelling next year's booked holiday! Far better to avoid all the future hurt and unpleasantness to come by ensuring that he and his family were not at home when the bailiffs arrive to take his car, furniture and home.

My group work with such response types proved very successful. In order to break their pattern of avoidance behavior, this essentially involved encouraging them to express their anger when they felt it, to honestly express all their feelings, to learn to give compliments to self, to learn to refuse requests without explanation and to learn to relax.

Are you the non-assertive response pattern type? Would you like to change?
It's not too late you know. It's never too late!" William Forde:January 30th, 2016.

January 29th, 2016.

29/1/2016

Thought for today:
"Only cultural climbers and shallow folk of social aspiration try to impress clever people. Clever people just do what they do. They can see both the serious and funny side of life and if they think you're being too damned serious, they will simply stick their tongue out at you when you're not looking, whisper 'wanker' and expel a silent fart in your direction." William Forde: January 29th, 2016.

January 28th, 2016.

28/1/2016

Thought for today:
"There is no shame in making a mistake. As the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce remarked, 'Mistakes are the portals of discovery.'

During my lifetime I have never allowed my mistakes to define me, and I've made as many as most folk. I have instead reflected upon them to extend my range of possibilities by trying to learn from them.

Were I to live my life all over again, I know that there would be as many mistakes to be found in my future actions as there were in my past ones; not because I refuse to learn from my mistakes, but rather that I don't fear them occurring whenever I try out something new. When I look back on my life, I now know that the mistakes I made, along with every experience I ever had, made me.

The biggest mistake we make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what we know best by being the person we truly are. I know of so many people who either struggle at their work, don't get any satisfaction from their job and are essentially clock watching until the end of the shift or working out their time until they get their bus pass and pension. For a person in their prime of life, it saddens me when all they look forward to is retirement and old age.

Everything I ever did, both good and bad, right and wrong was meant to happen to me in the way it happened in order to produce the me I now am. As a child I stole quite frequently. I eventually became a good thief and after life's graduation, I turned from poacher to gamekeeper and became a Probation Officer for twenty five years. As a teenager, I was a very angry young man who often found it impossible to control my temper. I had a proneness to hit out at anything or anyone that angered me. At the age of 32 years, I founded the process of 'Anger Management' which I freely gave to the world. Within a matter of a few years, 'Anger Management' had mushroomed across the English speaking world and has since helped more people than I could ever count or was ever angry with.

Though I have been married more than once, I'd have to confess that my greatest need was probably to be a 'father' more than a 'husband.' Being reared in a large, Irish Catholic family, I was brought up with the expectation that every good woman was a good mother to her children. I have since learned that there are many reasons that can prevent a good woman being a good mother, particularly an illness that temporarily robs them of their capacity and inclination to display maternal instincts.

Unfortunately, my first wife suffered from post-natal depression. This was a condition not then defined as such by the medical profession which resulted in behaviour that I found unnatural and inexplicable at the time. As a consequence of experiencing post-natal-depression, she found herself unable to behave motherly towards our two young children immediately after their respective births and for a period of over three years, she effectively wanted little contact with them. During this protracted period I undertook both the roles of father and mother, believing I was helping my wife as well as looking out for the welfare of our two children. I wasn't! It was only after we'd separated and divorced that she started to behave like a 'mother' towards them for the first time. Only then did I realise that she wasn't a 'bad mother,' but an 'ill mother.' It was only in later years did it dawn on me that my own concern for our children at the time which led to me performing the dual roles of both 'father' and 'mother,' had effectively slowed down her potential progress and had denied my wife exercising her role as 'mother' to our children for a much longer period than otherwise might have been necessary.

After an acrimonious marital separation and divorce, my first wife, who'd been an unwell woman stopped being ill and became a healthy but very unreasonable woman instead. She denied me access to our two children for over two years and refused me any form of contact with them; even preventing me having any contact by letter or phone and returning presents I sent them for their birthdays etc. Unable to have contact with my own children, I found myself unconsciously seeking consolation through my contact with thousands of other children of their age.

Over the following years I became a children's author of some renown, publishing dozens of books and allowing the £200,000 profits from their sales to go to charity (mostly children's charities and causes). Between 1990 and 2002, I visited over 2,000 Yorkshire schools, holding assemblies to raise awareness of pressing child issues and bringing over 800 famous names and celebrities to read to them from my books in a bid to make the school children special.

At the age of eleven years, following a traffic accident from which I was not expected to survive, a life saving operation was successfully performed on me by an African surgeon at Batley Hospital. Despite being reared in a more racist country than England is today, I later went on to spend a large part of my life actively working to fight racism. As the country's youngest shop steward at the age of eighteen in 1960, and at a time when blacks and dark skinned people were barred openly from certain jobs, accommodation, clubs and were widely discriminated against, I brought hundreds of workers out on strike because my employers refused to let a South African job applicant fill a post for which he was qualified, simply because he was black. In early 2000, I worked in liaison with the Jamaican Education Minister to set up a pen-pal project between all thirty two schools in Falmouth (the old slave capital) and thirty two schools in Yorkshire in a bid to reduce racism between black and white pupils and increase a greater understanding of each other's cultures.

Throughout my life as a young man, I fell in love with life and every good looking woman in it that came my way. I was in short what my late mother would have accurately described as 'a romantic fool.' Around 2003, I put up my pen, having decided that I'd written enough books and due to ill-health factors, I retired early. After I met my wife Sheila in 2010, I fell in love all over again. She saw the romantic in me and persuaded me to start writing once more. Since that date, I have had an additional dozen books published; all romantic novels of course, making 65 publications in total. (All profits will continue to go to charitable causes in perpetuity).

During my earlier life, one of my traits would have undoubtedly been stamina. While defying the medical prognosis as an eleven year old boy by walking again after three years of being unable to walk, many would have mistakenly viewed me as 'courageous.' It would be closer to the truth to say that I genuinely feared the prospect of never walking again and I didn't possess the courage it would require to live out the remainder of my life as a crippled person from the seat of a wheelchair!

It is only during recent years that I've had both courage and inclination to look behind the mask of my past and to see the unvarnished truth head on, particularly relating to my failings and mistakes along with my many successes. It is only since I was told of my terminal illness a few years ago that I've experienced a fullness of life I've never felt before. It is only since I have found the strength to genuinely make myself vulnerable by revealing my daily thoughts on this page that I've found the real me I've always been and for whom I've searched so long.

We are not so or do this as the result of accident and there are no insignificant or meaningless coincidences in one's life. Not only do our failures and successes spring from all our actions, but the reasons for them are also to be found in in our life's experiences. Fate has much more to do with fact than we will ever know. So fear not the making of mistakes and know that if you can learn from them. Know also that they will be the making of you! All through my childhood I tried to be the me I most wanted to be. It was only when things had settled down in my old age that I could see more clearly the me I have been and now am, warts and all!" William Forde: January 28th, 2016.

January 27th, 2016.

27/1/2016

Thought for today:
"You're a loyal dog Shep and deserve a big kiss. I'm so glad we found each other. What I like best about you Shep is that you keep all my secrets and you never criticise me. Even when I do naughty things you don't leave my side; you stay with me. In all the time we've been together, not once have you complained. You know all there is to know about me, but don't tell. You're a good dog and you're my dog. When we get back home, you can have a big fat biscuit!" William Forde: January 27th, 2016.

January 26th, 2016.

26/1/2016

Thought for today:
"Today I go into hospital to get my other hand to operated on. When I phoned the hospital yesterday to check if my platelet count was high enough to have the operation, I learned that they were extremely low. The cancer ward said that I should cancel the operation but the blood lab and the hand surgeon said it would be okay to go ahead with it. It is like one hand doesn't know what the other hand's doing. Getting my hand operated on today naturally took my morning thoughts to those of 'touch.'

The people who touch our lives more than any others are those who are prepared to reach out. They have learned that often the greatest journeys through life begin with nothing more than reaching out and holding another's hand. Often, people can derive more comfort by their hand being tenderly held instead of money being pressed into it. Whenever we reach out to someone in need we learn something essential; that we were born to give. It is only through our acts of giving to others, the things they need more than us, that we truly become acquainted with the good people we were meant to be.

Never reach out your hand unless you are willing to extend it as far as the needs of another. Never withdraw it until it is no longer needed. To offer an empty hand to a person in need is to tease the tragedy of their circumstances and to laugh at them being laid low. Most of us possess much more than we shall ever need and while possession of itself is a natural trait to develop, it undoubtedly becomes easier for a wealthy person to lose touch with their own humanity while they focus upon the richness of their own circumstances instead of the poverty in the lives of others.

Many years ago when I was a child, I asked my mother, 'When we give to charity, how do we know how much to give? How do we know when we've given enough?' My mother, who was the most generous of women and would willingly give away her last penny without second thought replied, 'I would say, Billy, when it hurts to give any more, then you have probably given enough!'

I also remember as a child a poor neighbour who had a large family to keep and no husband to provide for them. The neighbour was extremely proud, yet lived from hand to mouth, one week to the next. Paradoxically, the only nice thing she possessed in the world was a beautiful red-leather purse which she carried everywhere with her. She handled her purse so much that it was the softest of leather to behold. Nobody would ever see her without her purse in one hand, yet everyone knew that what she proudly carried was always empty, bar a few pennies and half pennies. I often wondered the point anyone might have of carrying around an empty purse, but my mother didn't. Mum knew that one's purse was inversely proportional to one's heart; if one was full the other would be empty and vice versa!

Generosity and compassion to the plight of another requires unselfishness and feeling. If the act isn't colour blind, then it isn't genuine compassion which is being displayed and if the gift is given reluctantly, then it cannot be true generosity." William Forde: January 26th, 2016.

January 25th, 2016.

25/1/2016

Thought for today:
"A well known cure for boredom is curiosity. Unfortunately there is no cure for curiosity because the more we find out, the more we usually want to know. There are no foolish questions that either man or monkey can ask and neither ever risks becoming a fool until they stop asking. Just as life is meant to be lived, curiosity is meant to be nourished and kept alive. We all like to come across pearls of wisdom, but the simple truth is that only those of an inquisitive nature who are prepared to dive deeper into unknown waters are fated to find the oyster.

The absolute beauty about the world in which we live is that somewhere, right now, a breakthrough in medicine is on the verge of discovery and something incredible is waiting to happen. It could be the discovery of another planet in the galaxy, the learning that you are pregnant with the child that you have yearned to conceive since your marriage fifteen years earlier and never could, or perhaps the reunification of a mother with the son or daughter she gave up for adoption forty years earlier and whom she has bitterly cried herself to sleep nightly about ever since!

We live in a beautiful, amazing world where often breakthrough and discovery is separated from a person by no more than their curiosity, persistence and strength of belief." William Forde: January 25th, 2016.

January 24th, 2016

24/1/2016

Thought for today:
"Most of my life has been lived never knowing too much about my family background, apart from what my mum and dad chose to tell me, and because my father never said much about his family's background, I depended largely upon what mum passed on. My mother used to tell me that though her birthday is registered as being January 22nd, she was in fact born on January 24th. Happy birthday mum. I can't believe that almost thirty years have elapsed since you died.I love you.

Because I had been born in Southern Ireland in the heart of IRA country, along with my parents and two of my younger siblings, there always seemed to be a short straw drawn whenever I asked about my grandparents' background or their parents. The family mystery also deepened when it came about that though I was the eldest of seven children born to the same parents, some had their surname Forde spelt with the 'e' and others didn't! This discrepancy in our surname was quickly noticed by our teachers who marked down all of the siblings whose signature was written without an 'e' for bad spelling and not knowing how to write their own name. This led them to feeling pressurised and to adopting an 'e' at the end of their surname before they left school.

I was born in Portlaw, County Waterford in the house of my maternal grandparents. My mother told me as a child, that her father had been 'on the run' with the rebels following the 1916 Easter uprising and every morning I passed a wall full of framed Irish rebels which adorned the long corridor. They were headed by Kevin Barry, a famous rebel who was imprisoned in Mountjoy Prison and the first Irish Republican to be executed by the British for his part in an Irish Volunteers operation which led to the death of three British soldiers.

A number of years ago, whilst in Kilkenny at the family funeral of a cousin, I met my cousin John. Before that meeting, John didn't know I existed. After the funeral of cousin Teresa, I was standing in a crowded Kilkenny pub where the funeral party had naturally progressed to after the graveside service. At my back I overheard two men talking about a football hero of theirs who played for Kilkenny and also for the Irish national soccer squad. 'The best soccer player I ever saw on the field was Paddy Forde' I heard one man tell the other. 'He was my uncle' replied the other man proudly, who I tapped on the back to draw his attention before saying, 'And he was my dad!'

My cousin John who lived in Wales was overjoyed to meet me. He had sadly told his wife earlier that day that now his cousin Teresa had died, he was the only Forde left alive. I'm glad to say that he was overjoyed to learn that he had a large number of Forde relatives living in West Yorkshire and since he rediscovered his family roots, he and his wife Lynne now keep in regular contact.

John's father and mine were the closest of brothers. John's surname was the Ford without an 'e'. Over the years that followed, we frequently ribbed each other as to who was living the life of a fraud using the wrong surname and whose marriage might be null and void and children illegitimate as a consequence of supplying inaccurate information to the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths?

In October 2015, my daughter Rebecca showed me a family tree which her maternal grandfather, whose newfound hobby is genealogy, had recently researched. It felt like I was on that popular television programme, 'Who do you think you are?' as the murky waters of my past revealed some surprises. I discovered that my paternal grandfather had been born in England, joined the British Army and was posted to Ireland where he lived thereafter. His army service resulted in him receiving not medals of distinctinction, but a prison sentence for 'Desertion' from the British Army. We never knew if it was because he had changed his sympathies from the British Crown to the IRA or whether he'd just had enough of army life and peeling spuds and decided to leg it. The records show that he was subsequently incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison; that hallowed jail which had held the Irish rebel, Kevin Barry many years earlier. I couldn't say that it was the same cell from which Kevin Barry made his final walk to meet his executioner; but it could have been! The prison records and a later census showed that when he entered Mountjoy Prison, my paternal grandfather's surname was registered as being Ford without an 'e', but upon his release, the letter 'e' was instantly and mysteriously adopted by him and the new family surname magically became Forde with an 'e'. So it seems that I have been spelling my surname wrong for the whole of my life however accurately/inaccurately my birth was registered; but I'm not changing the spelling of it now, having owned it for 73 years!

When my parent's seven children were born, the ones that my mother registered were given no 'e' whilst the ones my father registered were! I should have guessed that if one of my parents was telling the whole truth, it would have been my mother! Upon examining the family tree further, I learned that despite being the eldest of seven children, that for over seventy years, the sister I'd been calling Eileen all of her life had in fact been named 'Eile' on her birth certificate. My other siblings had always invariably referred to her as Eile and each time I heard this, I just put it down to some short-handed lazy practice they'd picked up. The reason I called her Eileen is because that is the name my mother always addressed her by, and having done so for seventy years now, if it was good enough for the mum who gave birth to her, then it remained good enough for me! It is a puzzle though why mum should have Christened her Eile yet called her Eileen for the rest of her life, although less of a puzzle I imagine, being a mama's boy, why I should have listened to mum all my life and ignored my other six siblings!

It's a real mixed up world we Irish live in, when one thinks about it. No wonder the English have never able to conquer the Irish on the battlefield. It isn't because of the proneness of the Irish to hide in bushes during skirmishes whenever they fired upon the enemy; rather that they kept changing sides and changing name, making it impossible for anyone to know and and keep track of who was friend or foe! Happy birthday Mum xxx" William Forde: January 24th, 2016.

January 23rd, 2016.

23/1/2016

Thought for today:
'Come home Daddy, please come home' by William Forde: Copyright: January, 2016.

'How much hurt can a torn tear hold?
How much love can a heart unfold?
How much blood can a war contain?
How many letters 'til you're home again?
How long must I wait 'til you return?
How much longer must I yearn
for you back home again, Daddy?'

Copyright William Forde: January 23rd, 2016.

January 22nd, 2016.

22/1/2016

Thought for today:
"A few months ago I reached my 73rd birthday; a landmark that I would never have attained had I kept on smoking tobacco. Between the ages of eleven and sixty, I smoked cigarettes daily. The only bad thing that ever resulted from the closeness I shared with my mother was that she was a chain smoker and gave me the first puff of her cigarette when I was eleven years old, besides turning a blind eye when I used to buy the odd cigarette from the local tobacconist. Ironically, the only bad thing resulting from the close relationships I shared with my own children was that in earlier years of their development, I too often smoked thoughtlessly in their presence whilst illogically verbally discouraging them from ever adopting the habit. If there is a distinction to be drawn between my behaviour and that of my mother's towards our respective children, it is this. Given all the scientific disinformation coming from the bogus tobacco research findings at the time, she may not have known the harm she was doing by her example, while I had no such excuse to fall back upon. At worse, deep inside I knew or at best, I should have known, but preferred to allow fact to be transformed into suspicion.

When I first started smoking, many adults would invariably turn a blind eye to a young person having a puff and shop keepers would split a pack of five Woodbines and sell cigarettes to youngsters for two pence each on their way to school. This was a time when society had been generally led to believe that smoking reduced tension and had a considerable calming effect upon an individual.

If one examined newsreels at the time about soldiers in the war, it would have been easier to find a baboon who'd been awarded a Victoria Cross for bravery in battle than to have found a serving soldier without a cigarette drooping from his mouth!

I was in hospital a good many times as a child and I still recall patients smoking in their beds. I remember doctors smoking pipes on their rounds and patients waiting in doctor's surgeries as they coughed away amid the fumes of Woodbines. I never saw one of my favourite film stars seduce the romance in his life without first sharing the same cigarette with her in an act of social foreplay and can still remember doctors and eminent broadcasters chain smoking on television programmes as a matter of course.

During my early years of smoking in public, cinema owners engaged in the practice of pretending to consider the comfort of the non-smoker in their establishments by having the smokers sit on one side of the theatre and the non-smokers on the other. I don't know which bright spark thought up that one! Thinking back now to those days when one smoked at the table between courses, shocks me to the core. I find it hard to imagine that non-smokers allowed the smoking lobby to ruin their lives for far too long without throwing buckets of water over them at the first sight of smoke emanating from their gills. Also, I think I'd rather be asked to clean a toilet basin than wash out an overfilled ashtray, let alone be expected to kiss a woman who smoked and feel romantic about the experience!

Throughout my years of smoking over twenty fags on a good day and forty on a stressful one, I was forever employing my good brain to defy logic by refuting the possibility of ill-health and the likelihood of an earlier death as a consequence of my smoking habit. However many examples were cited to me of smokers dying in their early fifties, I'd come back with constant references to 'so and so' who'd smoked sixty Capstan full strength daily and lived passed their hundredth year before getting run over by a number 57 bus in Clapham. Even experiencing two heart attacks at the age of 58 years still wasn't enough inducement for me to break this dangerous habit. I still preferred to rely upon my unwavering belief in the constancy of 'fate' to that of 'fact.'

I was sixty years old when I eventually gave up smoking altogether and I only did so then after I finally admitted to myself that 'I was addicted to the weed' and as such, I was no longer in control of my own body and was just as pathetic as some drug addict injecting their bloodstream daily with harmful toxins in order to get a high.

Being a person who liked to be in control, once I got it into my head that the tobacco weed was controlling me and not me, it, that was the last straw! My ego just couldn't take it a moment longer and I stopped, cold turkey. Since the tobacco haze has cleared, it is now easy to see that I was certainly killing myself through a habit that me and my loved ones had paid dearly for during earlier years. However, like all meaningful insight, awareness needs to be self realised and not hammered home by another! Telling me to give up before I'd decided to do so under my own steam, would only result in me smoking an extra fag in sheer defiance!.

I would just say four things to any smoker today who wants to stop being an addict to tobacco. (1)When you decide to quit, do it for yourself. (2)Don't deceive yourself that there is such a thing as being able to cut down your regular intake to a mere few cigarettes smoked daily on a long term basis, as the strength of the addiction is far greater than your will power to hold back its inevitable advancement once more. (3)Never forget that though you have stopped smoking tobacco, you will stay a 'tobacco addict' for the rest of your life and will never be any farther than one cigarette away from starting up the habit again!

Finally, never underestimate the pulling power of the weed. That desired mood alteration that a smoker gets with that first cigarette of the day is no less powerful than the high feeling one gets when you are in love. Just as 'being in love' can create a blindness to all other possibilities than what you want to believe, and preventing you seeing what is beyond your nose, so does being hooked on smoking!

Just as The Platters informed us back in my days of wild youth with a few lines of their hit song:
'They said someday you'll find
all who love are blind.
Oh when your heart's on fire
you must realise
smoke gets in your eyes.'"
William Forde: January 22nd, 2016.

https://youtu.be/vfBboBz3yoc