FordeFables
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    • Strictly for Adults Novels >
      • Rebecca's Revenge
      • Come Back Peter
    • Tales from Portlaw >
      • No Need to Look for Love
      • 'The Love Quartet' >
        • The Tannery Wager
        • 'Fini and Archie'
        • 'The Love Bridge'
        • 'Forgotten Love'
      • The Priest's Calling Card >
        • Chapter One - The Irish Custom
        • Chapter Two - Patrick Duffy's Family Background
        • Chapter Three - Patrick Duffy Junior's Vocation to Priesthood
        • Chapter Four - The first years of the priesthood
        • Chapter Five - Father Patrick Duffy in Seattle
        • Chapter Six - Father Patrick Duffy, Portlaw Priest
        • Chapter Seven - Patrick Duffy Priest Power
        • Chapter Eight - Patrick Duffy Groundless Gossip
        • Chapter Nine - Monsignor Duffy of Portlaw
        • Chapter Ten - The Portlaw Inheritance of Patrick Duffy
      • Bigger and Better >
        • Chapter One - The Portlaw Runt
        • Chapter Two - Tony Arrives in California
        • Chapter Three - Tony's Life in San Francisco
        • Chapter Four - Tony and Mary
        • Chapter Five - The Portlaw Secret
      • The Oldest Woman in the World >
        • Chapter One - The Early Life of Sean Thornton
        • Chapter Two - Reporter to Investigator
        • Chapter Three - Search for the Oldest Person Alive
        • Chapter Four - Sean Thornton marries Sheila
        • Chapter Five - Discoveries of Widow Friggs' Past
        • Chapter Six - Facts and Truth are Not Always the Same
      • Sean and Sarah >
        • Chapter 1 - 'Return of the Prodigal Son'
        • Chapter 2 - 'The early years of sweet innocence in Portlaw'
        • Chapter 3 - 'The Separation'
        • Chapter 4 - 'Separation and Betrayal'
        • Chapter 5 - 'Portlaw to Manchester'
        • Chapter 6 - 'Salford Choices'
        • Chapter 7 - 'Life inside Prison'
        • Chapter 8 - 'The Aylesbury Pilgrimage'
        • Chapter 9 - Sean's interest in stone masonary'
        • Chapter 10 - 'Sean's and Tony's Partnership'
        • Chapter 11 - 'Return of the Prodigal Son'
      • The Alternative Christmas Party >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
      • The Life of Liam Lafferty >
        • Chapter One: ' Liam Lafferty is born'
        • Chapter Two : 'The Baptism of Liam Lafferty'
        • Chapter Three: 'The early years of Liam Lafferty'
        • Chapter Four : Early Manhood
        • Chapter Five : Ned's Secret Past
        • Chapter Six : Courtship and Marriage
        • Chapter Seven : Liam and Trish marry
        • Chapter Eight : Farley meets Ned
        • Chapter Nine : 'Ned comes clean to Farley'
        • Chapter Ten : Tragedy hits the family
        • Chapter Eleven : The future is brighter
      • The life and times of Joe Walsh >
        • Chapter One : 'The marriage of Margaret Mawd and Thomas Walsh’
        • Chapter Two 'The birth of Joe Walsh'
        • Chapter Three 'Marriage breakup and betrayal'
        • Chapter Four: ' The Walsh family breakup'
        • Chapter Five : ' Liverpool Lodgings'
        • Chapter Six: ' Settled times are established and tested'
        • Chapter Seven : 'Haworth is heaven is a place on earth'
        • Chapter Eight: 'Coming out'
        • Chapter Nine: Portlaw revenge
        • Chapter Ten: ' The murder trial of Paddy Groggy'
        • Chapter Eleven: 'New beginnings'
      • The Woman Who Hated Christmas >
        • 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.'
        • Chapter Six : 'The Christmas Dance'
        • Chapter Seven : 'The ballot for Shop Steward.'
        • Chapter Eight: ' Leaving the Mill'
        • Chapter Ten: ' Beth buries her Ghosts'
        • Chapter Eleven: Beth and Dermot start off married life in Galway.
        • Chapter Twelve: The Twin Tragedy of Christmas, 1992.'
        • Chapter Thirteen: 'The Christmas star returns'
        • Chapter Fourteen: ' Beth's future in Portlaw'
      • The Last Dance >
        • Chapter One - ‘Nancy Swales becomes the Widow Swales’
        • Chapter Two ‘The secret night life of Widow Swales’
        • Chapter Three ‘Meeting Richard again’
        • Chapter Four ‘Clancy’s Ballroom: March 1961’
        • Chapter Five ‘The All Ireland Dancing Rounds’
        • Chapter Six ‘James Mountford’
        • Chapter Seven ‘The All Ireland Ballroom Latin American Dance Final.’
        • Chapter Eight ‘The Final Arrives’
        • Chapter Nine: 'Beth in Manchester.'
      • 'Two Sisters' >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
        • Chapter Fifteen
        • Chapter Sixteen
        • Chapter Seventeen
      • Fourteen Days >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
      • ‘The Postman Always Knocks Twice’ >
        • Author's Foreword
        • Contents
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
        • Chapter Fifteen
        • Chapter Sixteen
        • Chapter Seventeen
        • Chapter Eighteen
        • Chapter Nineteen
        • Chapter Twenty
        • Chapter Twenty-One
        • Chapter Twenty-Two
  • Celebrity Contacts
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    • More Contacts with Celebrities >
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      • Two Women of Substance
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      • 'Growing up with grandparents'
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      • The Greatest
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January 31st, 2018

31/1/2018

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​Thought for today:
"This thing called 'failure' comes not from falling down but is born in the staying down and refusing to get back up to face life anew. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never thrown off their comfort blanket and tried anything new. The simple truth is the more often we get knocked down in life, and the more we get back up, the stronger we inevitably become.

Success in one's life comes more frequently to those who are prepared to make bedfellows of chance and opportunity. As the promoters of the National Lottery say,'You have to be in it to win it!' Consequently, the person who will always get more out of life will also be the one who puts more into it and isn't afraid to live it!

I used to practice singing in my youth and became good enough to earn a living from my voice for the first two months I lived in Montreal at the age of 21 years. At that time, I thought myself to be the best singer on the club circuit, only to discover there were many who were better. So I took my bat home, gave up my brief singing career and never sang again in public for forty years.

I recently became determined to learn the words of one of my mother's favourite songs that she sang daily as I grew up, 'The Isle of Innisfree'. This song is from the family film that all the Fordes watch every Christmas; 'The Quiet Man' starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. In order to memorise the words of my mother's song, I have practised singing it every morning and evening on my 'Alexa' contraption that Sheila bought me. This computerised piece of machinery plays whatever I want upon voice command. Not only is this good for the old grey matter in fighting off the onset of dementia, but it has been very good for me as a person. As a son, I am pleased to have learned the words of one of mum's favourite songs, and part of me wants to believe that mum hears her eldest sing it to her daily. As an Irishman who has never sought British naturalisation since I came to England at the age of 4 years, (to be precise, I didn't actually 'come' to England, but was 'brought' here by my parents without them seeking my consent), it is one way I can continue to fly the flag of the old country and maintain my rebel status. As a person aged 75 years, singing the song keeps me in touch with all that I have grown up to love. As an individual, my daily singing practise has actually led to a gradual improvement in my voice, or could it perhaps be a more rapid deterioration in my discriminating hearing capacity? Whatever is happening to me, I know I feel better when I sing!

Many a confident player of plain voice will sing out loud while others of greater timidity and uncertainty will spend their days in hiding among the long grass as they waste their time stringing and unstringing their instrument, while the song they came to sing remains unsung. The only melody they will play over and over is one of permanent regret, as the life they could have lived passes them by, leaving any audience they once hoped to entertain, long departed.

So be not afraid to fail, or to sing out, for in every failure can be found the seeds of future success and in every song can be heard the voice of all sentiment.

All action implies some risk, and the bolder the action the greater the risk. Risk-taking, however, provides the best immunisation to fear reduction; for without learning to engage in such risk from time to time, you'll simply become immobilised in the lamplight of uncertainty and get eaten up by the world around you." William Forde: January 31st, 2018.

https://youtu.be/-bJkKevvslY
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January 30th, 2018.

30/1/2018

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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 discreet smell in your direction.

Some of the most intellectual, the cleverest folk I have ever known obtained their knowledge from the University of Life. Their knowledge was born of pain, pleasure, glory, and the gratitude of their experience picked up from day to day and person to person. This doesn't mean that they never read a classic novel, or were unable to understand the structure of the stellar system or appreciate the intricate workings of a telegraph pole.
​
I have always prided myself on never having known any person/character whom I didn't learn something important from. Some might have been characters in a book, but mostly my mentors would have been the man and woman one might sit next to on a Clapham bus.

The first real lesson I ever learned was from my father. He taught me 'how to do without.' He's had a hard life as a child and wanted his children to be able to cope with whatever came their way when it wasn't what they wanted.

It was my mother who taught me always to stay generous, particularly to strangers. She once gave half her money away to a tramp in Manchester who begged the price of a cup of tea. When I berated her and said he'd now be drinking a pint in the nearest pub, she replied, 'Probably, Billy, but if I refused him, the time might come when I refuse someone who really needed help'. Mum went through life always giving more than was asked for and never less than was expected of her.

I once heard a discussion between a Mirfield butcher and a customer in his shop while I queued for a pound of sausages. The customer was telling the butcher that he hadn't spoken to his brother for fourteen years. The butcher's reply, which I never forgot was, 'The mark of a great man is his ability to forgive and a foolish one not to forget!'

An old cricketer called Albert, whom I once worked next to in a textile mill, was once telling me about another work colleague who had left work the day before, got run over by a bus and was killed outright. He then proceeded to open a cheese sandwich and gulped it down and went about his day wholly unaffected by the loss of his work mate. As Albert ate the last bite of his sandwich, he turned his machine back on and recommenced repairing the cloth he'd left off before his sandwich break. Albert taught me that whatever hits us, however badly we are knocked to the ground, that 'life goes on'!

A friend called Ron in Canada once saw me struggle to operate a switchboard in the hotel where we worked. I was a newly appointed receptionist and had never operated a switchboard before. Hundreds of guests had been stranded in Toronto overnight by fog and couldn't fly home to the States until the next day. As they got settled in their rooms, they naturally wanted to phone their families, telling them they were stranded in Canada. There were fewer than two dozen lines on the switchboard and almost 400 rooms buzzing me to phone out. Each time a room phoned the reception desk to phone out, a light would come on and buzz loudly. As I panicked with all the buzzing lights and put the guests through to the wrong people all over the globe, Ron sat me down and gave me a cigarette. He then said, 'All problem situations have a distraction, Bill, that prevents you solving them. My way is to first get rid of the distraction and then you'll see your way through'. Ron then turned off the buzzing sound on the lights on the switchboard and said, 'Now the distraction has been got rid of, let's solve the problem'. He then phoned up each room and gave each a time to phone back the reception and ask for a line out. The first time given was 15 minutes later, with a five minute space thereafter for every room he passed the same message to. The night was busy but nevertheless proved manageable.

I never forgot what Ron had taught me: to always get rid of the distraction first when problem-solving. I later learned that the distraction can be an object, a person, an obligation or whatever. So, if you cannot stand the job, leave it. The same could be true of a nagging wife or some hot curry you love but which always upsets your stomach afterwards. Look for those distractions that hamper problem-solving situations and first get rid of them before proceeding.

An old friend called Etta, taught me that one was never too old to learn, Even in her nineties, she decided to learn another foreign language; already being able to speak four different languages fluently. Even today, the fact that I have a terminal illness will never stop me planning ahead or seeing little point in starting something new I might never finish.

All the women I have ever loved have taught me that there is more to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories than first meets the eye. I have never been attracted to or ever wanted to go with any woman in my life whose natural hair colour wasn't black or its length, long. All my life, my dear mother never dyed her black hair that she always wore long!

I'll never forget attending my first Irish funeral. As the coffin was lowered into the open grave, the priest prayed over the coffin and described the deceased as being 'A great man, a gentleman and a scholar'. A part of me regretted never having really known this fine man. As I grew older and had attended many more Irish funerals, I came to realise that the priestly descriptions of all Irish men that are laid to rest are one and the same!

The Catholic Church has taught me the everlasting power of guilt and indoctrination. As the Jesuits said,' Give me a child until the age of seven and I'll give you the man". I have never known an Irish man or woman who lived entirely guilt free or who wasn't able to induce guilt at the drop of a hat whenever they wanted to get their own way. As for being the masters of emotional blackmail, the least said about that, the better!

All the animals in my life I grew to love, loved me unconditionally from the start until the end! I never needed to seek their respect as they gave it to me before I had earned it.

Finally, the greatest truth I ever learned was from the Book of Genesis. How appropriate a book name to carry through the generations, lessons of life; Genesis.....or should that better read Genes is? Forgive me if I use my own interpretation of this great book.

'God made the heavens and earth, the land and the sea. And he placed upon his earth animals, birds of the air and insects of the underworld. Then, He made the greatest of all His creations; you! My Lord God made the earth and filled it with all things wonderful. When it was finished, he breathed life into it and set it spinning on an axis of love; and it is the love of one person expressed to another that keeps it spinning in perpetual motion'.

This message of God taught me the greatest thing I ever learned or ever will; that love makes the world go 'round!" William Forde: January 30th, 2018.
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January 29th, 2018

29/1/2018

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​Thought for today:
"I was watching a film on the television the other day and towards the end, I found myself crying. I find it doesn't take too much hurt to stir my emotions and have a silent weep. Indeed, I have always been a crier, particularly when I encounter a child face hardship of life or death from some incurable illness. I have never been ashamed of crying because I know the process to be a safety valve; a form of bodily water purifier.

There is a sacredness in tears that only the heart can touch; there is a sadness in a loss that only the soul can feel. An old friend of mine, Etta, used to say,' Stay constant to all source of goodness and close to your God and you shall endure the worst of days and experience the best of times.'

Tears are often the morning's dew of sadness and carry more weight in their passage than speech ever could as daylight fades and the night descends. Tears are conducted by a sadness of the soul and reflect the overflowing of a happy heart. They can contradict the mood of the moment, making one laugh over sad times past and cry over happier times experienced. They are most often seen at times of birth and death and poignant moments in life.

The tears I always found the hardest to bear were those shed by the women in my life; my mother, daughter and wife, Sheila.

I'll never forget the tears of my father (a man who was brought up in a time when it was considered unmanly to cry) when I first asked him to buy me a bicycle at the age of 6 years. Financial circumstances wouldn't allow him to buy me a new bicycle, but he bought me what he could. The bicycle he bought me was from Cleckheaton Market Place. It was second hand and had no mudguards or brakes and cost him ten shillings. I loved it and I loved my dad a little bit more for his sacrifice.

As I lay dying in hospital at the age of 11 years after a horrific traffic accident and I heard the doctor say to my mother, 'I'm afraid your son will be lucky to see the night through, Mrs Forde', I'll never lose that image of her crying bitterly at the end of my bed as she anticipated the premature death of her firstborn.

I will never forget setting off to emigrate to Canada at the age of 21 years in 1963. As the taxi pulled away, I looked around and literally saw my mother's tears fall from her eyes onto the glass as she pressed her face up close to the frosted window pane as she wondered if she'd ever see me again. I also cried when I frequently saw my mother spit up blood, and I cried for a full week after her early death many years ago as I sorted through her personal belongings, as my father couldn't bear to.

I cried when I left my first love in Canada and flew back to England in 1965 knowing that we wouldn't see each other again. I cried with joy after the birth of all my children and I cried in the hospital when my son Adam became extremely poorly after his birth. I also wept on and off for days when my ex-wife told me unexpectedly that she didn't want to be married any longer and wanted a divorce.

The longest period I ever cried intermittently was for two years; every night before I went to sleep. This was at a time when my ex and the mother of my first two children, in defiance of the Court Order to the contrary, wouldn't allow me any contact whatsoever with my children. She wouldn't allow me to see them, talk to them or even write to them, or they me, for a full two-year period. Eventually, the court lost its patience with her and threatened her with immediate imprisonment if she continued to obstruct the Order of Court a moment longer.

I also cried at the death of our beautiful dog Lady in the October of 2016. She started to die when Sheila was in Singapore and I asked her to hang on until the day after when Sheila was due to return home. Our very first act when Sheila returned from her holiday was to take Lady to the vet and have her put to sleep.

Tears I found unbearable to witness were the ones from my daughter Becky after I told her I had a terminal illness. For weeks after, whenever she phoned me, I could hear her stifled tears down the telephone line as they pierced my heart.

The time that also wounded me was to see the tears of my wife, Sheila, during moments of sadness she experienced. To see someone you love more than anyone else in the world cry uncontrollably, and to know that while your presence and support undoubtedly helps them, nothing you do can remove the hurt that they are presently feeling, I find heartbreaking.

During my life's work as a probation officer, I have cried many times to see children, physically and sexually abused, to hear first hand of wife beatings, to deal with bereaved parents and spouses whose son, daughter, or partner has committed suicide. I have also cried to see recidivists reform their behaviour and settle down to a normal lifestyle.

I have silently wept all the way through the writing of this morning's post as feelings for any big loss are never forgotten by me or will never die completely.

​Never mistake tears as the mark of weakness; they are the true expression of love and concern and the main indicator that you still 'feel'. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues and act more boldly than the bravest of hearts. Tears are messengers of the soul and are capable of conveying overwhelming grief, deep contrition, boundless love and all manner of human emotion that is better expressed in feeling than in the spoken word.

My dear mother used to say,'If you must cry for me, Billy, cry every time I am hurt when I'm alive. It's no good crying over my grave. The dead don't hurt anymore.'" William Forde: January 29th, 2018.
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January 28th, 2018

28/1/2018

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​Thought for today:
"It is hard indeed, some might say impossible, to do important things in life and not feel important for having done them! Most of us possess egos that are bigger than ourselves and find it hard to keep our heads down low when others praise our name.

​When I was almost twelve, I incurred a serious traffic accident which threatened my life and then prevented my ability to walk for three years. During my hour at death's door, I promised God that if I lived I would try to make my life one for the good and service of others. God kept his part of the bargain and I have genuinely tried to honour mine ever since.

Over the years, I have always performed voluntary work in one capacity or another, and have allowed all profit from the sale of my book publications to be given to charitable causes, believing that in about the same degree that we are helpful, so will we be happy. I have always been assisted in this regard by the ongoing help of literally hundreds of people.

As securing regular press coverage was very important in the beginning to advance the charitable work we did, it became necessary and easier if I became the front man. As the front man, it was I who invariably became the person most lauded and praised through the media. And despite all efforts of me publicly praising the hard work of numerous others in any success we achieved every time I was interviewed by a media source, the names of others were rarely mentioned after editing had taken place. It was my name and my photograph that appeared in the press; it was me who was interviewed by the local radio and television channels, and me who was awarded a medal in the 1995 New Year's Honour's List and shook the Queen's hand.

My 15 years of visiting schools daily, and the promotion of many social causes I wanted to raise awareness of, could never have been done without the help of so many backroom workers and nearly 900 national and international celebrities. The musical play I wrote and produced with Lottery money and which is freely accessible to any school globally was only made possible by the two-years' hard work of eight dedicated people who worked alongside me throughout on the 'Mirfield Anger Management Committee' (MAMMA). We have the same unselfish commitment today in all walks of life; the hidden backroom workers who remain unseen by the public yet give freely of their time in the Charity Shops we enter. The thousands of volunteers; these unnamed heroes are the people who truly deserve the praise and everlasting gratitude of society. I have long ago ceased to be amazed by the unstinting generosity of so many good people in the world.

As a child, my mother acted as the best example of kindness I have ever known. I never knew her to give less of herself than was asked for and grew up watching her always give more than was expected. My father, who played football as a young man for Ireland, was (unlike me), the most modest man I ever knew. Throughout his life, he kept his light under a bushel and it was only years after his death that his family discovered how good and respected a man he'd been regarded in Kilkenny; the town where he was born.

In marked contrast, I grew up in a different age and soon realised that if I wanted my influence and charitable work to be as extensive as possible, it would be better achieved if I learned to cultivate the press, maximise ongoing publicity, meet famous people and obtain their help, endorsement and support for my writings, charitable causes, and published books.

At the height of my localised fame of having become a big fish in a small pond (between 1990 and 2003), I vaingloriously started to believe my own publicity, and for a brief while, I lost sight of my original goal; to advance a particular cause and not myself. I needed to relearn that one only ever truly becomes a person who does things that count after they've stopped being a person who counts them.

If I think hard and true, I know that it is the poor who have always given the most and it is those many millions of good neighbours and seemingly 'insignificant' folk who make the greatest difference to the world we live in: not the ones who are forever in the press like I used to be, but those modest souls who prefer to work below the radar and who give inconspicuously and receive no medals for their goodness. Such are the ones with the biggest hearts and I salute them one and all. They are truly kind to the core; simply the best kind of person there is.

It was only after having given large sums of money to charitable causes from the sales of my published books that I came to realise that my words and beliefs mattered more to others than any material wealth I ever gave. I came to realise that wherever 'goodness' exists, it comes from not sharing ones riches, but revealing to others their own. That is why I will spend an hour or more of every day for the rest of my life on my 'Thought for today''. I now know that is where I can be the most helpful and influential through the sharing of my strengths and weaknesses; in what I have done and what I have failed to do. In this manner, I may make my eventual death as hopefully meaningful as the life that preceded it, and if I can make the life and death of just one person more at ease with them in the process, I will be well satisfied.

One of my favourite writers was the poet Alexander Pope. I think the fact he had a crippled body initially spurred me to identify with him. Yet, crippled in body, he wrote the most beautiful of words that resonated strongly with me and demonstrated the finest of thought. In his Epilogue to Satires (1738), he achieved in ten words what I have just taken hundreds to illustrate: 'Do good by stealth and blush to find its fame.'" William Forde: January 28th, 2018.
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January 27th, 2018.

27/1/2018

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​Thought for today:
"In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals herd together for protection. 'Whatever happens, I just want you to know that I'll protect you.' Such are words of reassurance that most creatures need to hear.

Ever since first taking shelter in our mother's womb, mankind finds the constant need for protection, whether it be from the basic human requirements of cold, hunger, shelter or companionship.

Indeed creatures of the woods, forests, hills and open plains are clothed and coloured in nature's protection and are provided with additional features and varying abilities to enable them to survive and adapt to the changing circumstances and climates they'll meet.

Humans, on the other hand, desire protection no less. We seek protection from the sale of faulty goods, the cost of ill-health, the loss of a job, our inability to pay the monthly mortgage, the onset of old age and the worry of having to pay to enter an old folk's home in the latter years of our lives.

While governments are there to protect us all, unless its laws seek to first protect the most vulnerable in society; the young, old and the disabled, the State simply becomes an ineffectual guardian of vested interests.

Then there are those men who have a need to protect a woman and those women who need a man's protection, while some prefer to rely on no one's protection at all except their own. I know of many who depend on lucky charms, a St.Christopher medal or a rabbit's foot as protection from everyday perils, while some believe in the protection of crystals, Guardian Angels and some like myself, come to rely on the grace of God.

I may not know all there is to know about protection, but I know what won't protect me. I know that no amount of ignorance, cowardice, emotions of jealousy and mistrust, or burying my head in the sand will protect me from the future consequences of my actions or the actions of others. I know that facing facts will protect me far more than avoiding their meeting. I also know that the search for cooperation instead of competition and conflict is much more productive in the increase of lasting friendship and social cohesion within society.

Finally, I know that when you tell the truth and honour your word, you protect your integrity and all you stand for. In life, that is surely the best protection of all; for when dead and one lies at the other side of the green sod, you'll find none will protect you as the earthworms eat their fill from your last supper.

My Irish, Catholic mother who gave birth to seven children (of which I was the firstborn), had her own idea about 'female protection.' This was a concept which sprang from those times when a man was the breadwinner and the wife depended solely on what he handed over to her on a wage night to use for household finance management.

When her children reached their teens, my mother served in a restaurant three nights weekly in Cleckheaton, just to earn her own money which she then spent on cigarettes and other pleasures. After keeping house most of the week for her husband and seven children, she would spend the weekend nights playing 'house' at the bingo hall in Heckmondwike with her friends. She used to say, 'Billy, forget all this 'contraception' stuff; a woman's best protection in a marriage is a little money of her own and the right to spend it as she sees fit." William Forde: January 27th, 2018.
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January 26th, 2018.

26/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"Two posts from the 24th January from Facebook contacts, Janice Jagger and Molly Mulcahy; each of whom has recently lost friends with cancer, have stirred my mind for my 'Thought for today'.

Over the past four years, since I was diagnosed with a terminal blood cancer, I have experienced two six-month courses of chemotherapy, along with another two cancers to cope with along the way. During this period, so many Facebook contacts who also have cancer have maintained a regular correspondence with me and we have often been able to offer each other mutual advice, prayers and support.

Let me say from the outset, no condition, be it terminal or otherwise, affects any two people the same. Death by cancer can be sudden, it can sneak up on you, it can be dramatic, or it can kill you by degrees. It can be agonising, painful, debilitating or relatively pain-free. How one person responds to the death threat can vary enormously to the reaction of another.

During the past four years, there have been a number of times when I've been close to death, having contracted one infection or another, repeated flu dose or have had my 'immune free' body visited by some other illness. Sometimes, my body has been wracked with intolerable and intense pain and on other occasions, I have found my overall condition quite manageable. Throughout, however, I have kept positive in thought and prayerful in disposition and have had the ongoing support of my wife, Sheila, family, church community, neighbours, friends and countless Facebook contacts; all of whom have proved life-saving encouragers and carriers of buckets of hope as they have walked alongside me on my final journey.

Over the past six months, I have established a number of routines regarding, diet, exercise, relaxation, warmth, sleep, and discriminatory contact with certain people, places and the engagement of specific activities under particular conditions. As a consequence of putting these disciplines in place and maintaining them, I am pleased to report having felt better this past six months than any time during the last four years. Sometimes I have felt so good that I've forgotten I have a terminal illness.

With every positive stride taken in any cancer bearer's journey, however, there comes a consequential change-of-thought cost. I have had to readjust to the simple truth that just as the presence of pain in one's cancerous body all night and day long can indicate a certainty that one is going to die prematurely, ironically, the absence of pain is often the provider of false hope.

Don't get me wrong, I am so pleased that any pain level I currently have is mostly either minimal or tolerable, but the last journey any cancer traveller takes can be the hardest of all without anybody pain present along the way to keep one aware of their final destination.

When a person who has a terminal illness is pain-free, part of their irrational brain can start to play the cruellest of tricks on them. One starts to feel good again and a kind of normality of life and body stability begins to slowly return with the passing of each day. In a weird kind of way, one can sometimes feel a bit of a cheat that on the inside you are in fact dying, whereas outwardly you can look as fit as a fiddle. When the stabilisation period continues beyond one year into another, the cancer traveller whose condition remains terminal is in danger of convincing themselves that they've beaten off the enemy. In the deepest part of them lies the forlorn hope that the Holy Emperor of all Emperors in the Heavens above has turned his downward thumb direction back to upright and instantly granted  you continued life.

The most rational among us know, however, that things are rarely as they appear to be. There is no fault in our stars; our fate and destiny were planned even before our birth into this life. Some recoveries are indeed miraculous and medically inexplicable, whereas sadly, most cancer outcomes will be predictable. You will either beat your cancer or you won't. Your body will either be the conveyor of certain death, the subject of a miraculous recovery or the victim of a temporary illusion. For the vast majority of the latter type of cancer travellers, cancer will sometimes stay still a long time, hiding behind some comfort cloud, ready to jump out at us again when we are at our happiest and least expect it.

By all means, believe in what provides you with the greatest comfort and ease of mind, and always believe in the goodness of self and the greatness of God. But if you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain. There is no earthly reason why your final journey cannot be a satisfying and happy one if you follow a few pointers: don't travel the path alone: learn to hold the outstretched hand of another; and above all else, live for the moment, for in one moment lies all eternity. " William Forde: January 26th, 2018.


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January 25th, 2018

25/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"Yesterday, a dear Facebook contact messaged me about the death of her great granddaughter by foul means. This was the second such heartache the poor woman has experienced, having had her son murdered a number of years ago. She is naturally heartbroken and all I felt able to do was to pray and cry for her.

The same day, I was reminded by Facebook of a poem I did two years ago entitled 'Come home Daddy, please come home'. The poem got me thinking about the many different wars we each fight in our daily lives, Although the poem is about a young boy missing his father who is fighting a war in a foreign land, it also brought back memories of my own mother who fought a war on want for the majority of her life; along with all those others who are fighting their own personal war today and are engaged in their own struggle against, bereavement, poverty, ignorance, depression, mounting debt, discrimination, physical-mental-pschological-abuse, illness, starvation, homelessness and civil strife.

In particular, the words of my poem seemed to resonate with the heartbreak and war of despair my dear Facebook friend must be going through at this time in her life. May all of you with great losses to bear find the strength to one day 'come home again' to the person you want to be and used to be, to a place where you are wrapped in a blanket of love and security.


'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?'


William Forde: January 25th, 2018
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January 24th, 2018.

24/1/2018

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​Thought for today:
"Abraham Lincoln, former President of the USA, was, if nothing else, a man who remained true to himself. At the very start of his Presidency he told the people that he desired to conduct the affairs of his administration in such a manner that if at the end of it when he came to lay down the reins of power, even if he'd lost every friend on earth he'd ever had, he would be content in the knowledge that deep down inside, he would at least have one friend left; himself.

This expression by Lincoln brought to mind a saying that my mother frequently espoused during my youth. She would often remind me, 'Whoever you fall out with, Billy, never fall out with yourself. That way you'll always have someone to fall back on who's dependable!'

This led me to the thought, 'But who am I?' Do we ever know who we really are? When we hear people saying that 'I need to find myself', are they speaking figuratively or are they questioning their paternity? Let's face it, folks, while the overwhelming majority of us can know that mum is our mum because we can prove she gave birth to us, does anyone ever know who their father was without a 100% up-to-date paternity test?

Mum was born on this day, the 24th of January 1922, although throughout her life she frequently told us that it was the 25th of January when she really came into the world. It is no great surprise to me, or any other Irish citizen, when a person's birth certificate doesn't precisely correspond with what is really accurate in date, name spelling, or even the origin of paternity! It was common in the lives of some Irish folk to grow up in their aunt's house only to discover in later life that Aunt Peggy was really a much closer relative. I have known a number of Irish people grow up with 'a big sister' who later turned out to be their real mum or a grandmother who they believed was their real mum.

I have always had an 'e' at the end of my name 'Forde', but two siblings plus a few cousins I know, haven't. I know that my English Grandfather entered prison in Ireland with an 'e' on his surname and came out without one! I even heard tell of an Irish uncle (now deceased) who lived between countries during a part of his life and when he became entitled to receiving his pension, he collected two until the day he died. He would have the one from the Irish Post Office collected on his behalf and posted across to England while he would collect his pension from the English Post Office himself. Both pension books would have the same surname, but an 'n' would be missing out of one of them.

Such misunderstandings became more common after the 1916 Easter Rising, after men 'on the run' who had spent years lying low gradually started to return to their homes and sticking their heads above the parapet again.

I also suspect that behind this process of confabulation and mystery merely lay the desire to have two names, two birthday cakes or have a blood connection with more than one family, just in case you fell out with one side or the other!

I am eternally grateful to you Mum for providing me with enough tales from the old country to have used in dozens of novels I have written under the umbrella title of 'Tales from Portlaw'. It bothers me not if they have their origin in truth or some old cock and bull yarn you once heard in the pub one day.

Mum died at the early age of 64 years on the 26th April 1986 and I know that she is at peace with her Maker, family, friends and herself. God bless you, Mum. I love you, but why in God's name do I have an 'e' on my surname when I've two brothers who haven't? "William Forde: January 24th, 2018
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January 23rd, 2018.

23/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"Mummy is always telling me that I shouldn't take sweets from strangers and that I shouldn't let big boys kiss me or take liberties, but just this once I'll make an exception; so, put it there Buster!" William Forde January 23rd, 2018.
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January 22nd, 2018.

22/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"As an established author since 1989, I am frequently asked about the inspiration for my sources and the background material to my stories. Most common among the questions asked are (1) 'Is the content biographical?' and (2) 'Are your story characters real people you have known in your life?' The short answer to both these questions in that order is 'partly' and 'mostly'.

Over the years I have run several dozen creative writing courses for school children between the ages of 10 and 18 years. Their most common question asked would invariably be,'What do I write about?' to which my reply would always be, 'Write about something you know, and that means something emotional to you.' I want them to know that we own everything that happens to us, and once the feeling is within us, the words attached to it are more easily found. The class teachers always preferred this approach, as it enabled poorer and less academic pupils; those who'd had the hardest knocks and saddest experiences in life to be advantaged in class for once.

I found that by using the social disadvantage of a pupil's experience, some of the finest writing I have known has come from the pen of a youngster who could barely write a sentence previously. All that I was doing was getting the pupils to express their honest feelings on paper and once they started to express themselves about something which came from their lives, they were a captured audience.

​The pupils who had the hardest of home lives were streets ahead of those pupils who lived in more comfortable surroundings and were encouraged by their parents daily to succeed. Once I got across the benefits in health terms for being able to honestly express one's feelings, particularly bad feelings which had been repressed for many years, most pupils saw the creative writing process as being life enhancing and cathartic.

I recall one teacher from Barnsly, where I'd given her class a creative writing course some six months earlier telling me about young Sam, a boy from a large family with an abusive stepfather. The teacher had given her 10-year-old pupils an exercise to complete over the long summer holidays, which was to be handed in upon their September return to school. The exercise was to write an essay about one's holiday experiences.

As to be expected, most essays described where the pupil had been for their holidays and all the exotic things they'd seen and done. As it happened, the teacher was pleased to award 'best essay' to Sam, who'd never before won anything in his life. Sam couldn't afford to go on holiday, and he spent the six weeks running errands and keeping his grandmother company, who sadly died one week before Sam returned to school.

During his six-week school-holiday break, Sam's 15-year-old sister gave birth to a son, one of his brothers came out of prison after having served a two-year custodial sentence for aggravated assault, and his mother had taken the family and moved into sheltered accommodation to get away from her abusive partner. Sam wrote in his essay that his mum and her partner were unfortunately reconciled after three weeks, but added that those three weeks without her bloke living with them were the most peaceful and trouble-free he'd known for a long time.

​It is therefore with little surprise to discover that an author's first published book will be largely autobiographical. In subsequent books that follow, many of the character experiences and indeed the characters themselves often remain silhouettes of real life people. I often create a character by using a combination of characters I have known in real life and giving them traits from each. Indeed many of the characters I write about represent a collage of their good and bad traits.

I remember being very angry with my first wife after our divorce, particularly when she refused to let me see our two children for two years. While it would have been so easy to have lost my temper and knocked her front door in with an axe, I found it more therapeutic and within the law to depict her character in a book I was writing for school children and young adults. I got two photographs, one of my first wife and an uncharitable one of Margaret Thatcher. I asked the artist, Dave Bradbury of Huddersfield to combine the two images and to present me with a front cover of an angry/greedy woman with blue rinsed hair, falling flat on her big bottom. I called the character 'Mad Maggie'. I then thought about every nasty and evil woman I'd ever known and heard of and gave the 'Mad Maggie' character corresponding traits to match.Every child who read about her, instantly found the character distasteful and wanted to see her get her come-uppance.

The beauty was that tens of thousands of my books were sold exclusively to Yorkshire schools each year and my ex-wife (who was a teacher in Yorkshire), would undoubtedly see both book and cover image without ever knowing that she had been the inspiration! I suppose that in many ways, creativeness can prove to be an ideal act of defiance. Let's face it folks, nobody can't blame the writer for what his character does and says, can they? Not even their ex-wife!

Some people who read books seek 'escapism,' whereas I like to provide them with that experience through my own pieces of 'reality'. Most people read to know that they are not alone in their experiences. I know some people who write to obtain insight. I know some who want to be the characters they are not and could never be, and I know others who are afraid to do and express the emotions that their characters do.They effectively give themselves a vicarious pleasure through the creative role of a fictional one.

I have always viewed writing and image construction as being the creative heart of my life. As far as seeing myself as a professional writer, despite having had 67 books published, I still prefer to view myself as being a social crusader with some writing talent. At the end of the day, writing involves the ability to construct a number of paragraphs alongside a number of images with words to match.

I know of so many people who have a book inside them but have never got around to the discipline of writing it. Let me tell you that nothing haunts us more than the things we never say and nothing is more frustrating than the words that we could put on paper, but never write.

​My own advice to everyone is to write that first book; not in the hope of it becoming a best seller and making you rich, but because it is much better out of you than being frustrated inside you!

I loved telling stories to my young children at their bedtimes which I made up. I then fell into the role of writing stories for children. I loved writing for children during my earlier years as an author, not so that I could tell them that dragons existed, but because I could thenmshow them how the human ones could be beaten." William Forde: January 22nd, 2018.

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January 21st, 2018

21/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"A true friend is the greatest of life's assets that will come your way. Never underestimate their value in your life and the part they play in your overall sense of well-being and happiness.

Let me stand up and be counted; I knew I loved my Sheila the moment I first fancied her, but I never knew how much I loved her until she became my friend. I often need to be on my own, but I also need friends that I can call on. I need people I know who don't speak idle words and false platitudes to keep our friendship going. I want friends with the courage to say 'talk, shut up and listen', and to feel comfortable in doing so. Give me a friend who will neither abandon me in a storm nor shelter from my upset.

Though I may be strong, I will be stronger by having a true friend by my side when I am cold, cheerless and in need of companionship. What I don't need is a friend to falsely flatter or fawn my affection. I don't need a carbon copy of me to reinforce my substance of being; by doing what I do whenever I choose to do it: my shadow does that well enough. 

What I need in a true friend is all you are when you are at your best. I need you, Sheila Forde xxx" William Forde: January 21st, 2018.
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January 20th, 2018

20/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"There is no greater achievement in the world than making a one-time enemy your closest friend. At the core of enmity between two strangers lies indifference to the possibility of reconciliation. To convert enmity to friendship, the past should be left to sleep and a new day awakened.

​True forgiveness of another comes and wholesomeness takes root when you realise that you cannot speak badly of them anymore even when you remember that you were bruised and broken because of them.

My mother used to say, 'Billy if you want to beat your enemy forever, make them your friend.'

I don't know why but is always easier to forgive an enemy than to pardon the misgivings of a friend. Perhaps it is because when an enemy wrongs you, you more readily expect it, but when a friend does you down, it always carries a sense of betrayal with the sourness of experience? My own feeling is that the hardest enemy to make your friend is the one who already pretends to be your friend.

There is a story that was turned into a film of the world's longest duel between two French Hussar officers in the Napoleonic wars. They were called Dupont and Fournier. Their feud started with a misunderstanding and went on for nearly nineteen years. They fought over thirty duels, with neither man showing any inclination of calling a truce. Finally, they decided to end it because one of them was getting married. By that time they had forgotten the incident which led to one of them having taken offence two decades earlier.

Of all the people who should never become your enemy is a member of your family, whatever the original action that caused the rift between you. Should you still hold ill-will or enmity against a family member, consider being the first to let it go and make peaceful overtures. In the sad event, your gesture of goodwill goes begging, keep the offer open and don't use their refusal to shake hands as a justification for your initial action.

It is a sad truth that we cannot always make things sweeter which have carried a sour and bitter taste for so long, but there is absolutely no need to swallow the bitterness; far better for yourself to spit it out and drink afresh." William Forde: January 20th, 2018.

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January 19th, 2018

19/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"I believe that everything we do, everyone we meet and every obstacle we incur during our life is put in our path for a purpose. Things happen because they were meant to be; our fate and destiny is mapped out, even before we were planned in our parent's mind. Yes, there are moments of chance in our lives, but I believe that the dice was thrown long ago, but is still in the air, and has not yet landed! How we use the opportunities to come our way; how we greet the stranger and comfort the suffering, and how honestly and fairly we deal with others and ourselves, I also believe to be part of the eternal equation. It is in this latter area that our 'free will' is given a part to play in influencing our future. The only possible merit to be had in 'seizing the moment' is if we use it to good purpose.

We need faith to travel unexplored paths of uncertain outcome, but we can usually bet that when we find a path without obstacles, it doesn't lead anywhere worth going. There are so many paths that we can follow and too many opportunities of getting lost and straying along the way.

There were many times in my earlier life when I went down the wrong path and found myself in the wrong place, with the wrong people, doing the wrong thing. These were times when I was lost in the wilderness, having thrown away my compass and moral moorings. Fortunately, at such times in my life, fate stepped in and someone was there who believed in me enough to give me 'a second chance'.

The first to offer me a ‘second chance’ was Mrs Lockwood, mother to my close friend Peter. I was 11 years old at the time and would often have tea at the Lockwood’s home on Windybank Estate. Two days earlier, I had started ‘going with’ 12-year-old Winifred Healy at school. ‘Going with’ meant that the couple was officially boyfriend and girlfriend and had agreed to marry when they were 21 years old. This was no loose commitment, as it was made in the early 50s when a male would be sued to the high heavens for 'breach of promise' to marry the woman he was pledged to. Having secured the promise of Winifred’s hand, I naturally wanted to seal the deal properly by putting a diamond ring on her third finger. Coming from a poor household where having enough food to eat was a rarity, let alone sparklers to splash around, I did the only thing I could think of. The next time I ate at my friend Peter Lockwood’s house, I stole his sister Margaret’s engagement ring to give to my girlfriend Winifred, to impress her. The police were informed, and Winifred was forced to return the ring and not surprisingly, she never waited for me but joined a convent to become a nun when she left school. The biggest surprise of all, however, was that Peter’s mum, still invited me for tea thereafter and Peter and I remained the best of friends until he died a number of years ago.

The greengrocer, Mr Northrop was another person who gave me a ‘second chance’. As a boy of 15 years, I stole apples from his shop and ran off. He saw me and then visited my parents at home two days later. I quaked in my boots when I saw him at the door that my father answered, fearing that once he told my dad, I wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week. Instead of informing my parents of my theft from his shop, he offered me a Saturday morning job which I worked at for two years. It was his involvement in my life and his belief that I would turn honest that essentially led me to become a Probation Officer in later life.

I was to stray from the path of goodness so frequently that like many a sinner, I needed 'second chances' four, five, six and many more times than I care to remember before I found the strength to stay on course.

When I became an author in later life, for the first twenty years I wrote books for children and young persons. I always wrote about feelings and situations in life that children find hard to healthily process like, loss, separation, homelessness, bereavement etc. Among the earliest of my most popular books published was 'Sleezy the Fox'. Its theme was 'second chances'. It sold over 50,000 copies in Yorkshire schools, I believe largely because of the relevance of its theme; everyone needs 'second chances' in their lives at one time or another.

My father, who'd had a hard upbringing as a child, often warned me against choosing the path of least resistance as being the right one to follow wherever I screwed up another 'second chance' I'd been given. My mother, on the other hand, had more hope in me and trusted my eventual choice to choose right over wrong and good over bad. She cared not which path I took so long as 'I chose it' and didn't walk it in blind ignorance or neglectful intent. The one piece of advice she gave me which I treasured was, 'Remember, Billy, all the schooling and learning you've had is useless unless you can ease your journey and the passage of others' (paraphrased).

So I tossed a coin in the air to decide which parents' philosophy was best for me to follow. You know, tossing a coin doesn't of itself decide one's future by which side it falls to the ground. It is during that briefest of moments when it is in the air spinning when it comes to you what you really want and which side you wish the coin to fall. My mother's path seemed the right road for me to follow, and so I devoted most of my working life helping others who needed someone to believe in them; who needed a ‘second chance’. I’m glad to say in following my path of choice, I've found my puddle of peace and many moments of contentment and satisfaction along the way.

And while I haven't yet reached my journey's end, all the beautiful people I've met along the way have made my journey worth every smile, laughter, tear, pleasure, pain, happiness or heartache I've experienced. I hope it is a while yet before the finishing post comes into view as I still need a few more 'second chances' to get sorted, before I'm ready to say, 'I've done all I can, Lord. Take it or leave it!" William Forde: January 19th, 2018.
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January 18th, 2018.

18/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"We all tend to hang out from time to time in places that would deeply embarrass us if others saw us.

'Embarrassment' is much more than an involuntary reddening of the face. It is even worse than an explosive fart in a crowded library; it is a shaming of the soul. Embarrassment makes one person laugh, another cry and another lock themselves away in a room for six months before daring to show their face again. Whether you be the cinema-goer who cries bucket loads during certain films and pretend to wipe your nose or clean your spectacles to disguise your action or the six-foot-tall guy who dare not admit to having seen 'The Sound of Music' ten times as a seventeen-year-old; we have all experienced moments of monumental cringe at one time or another. And yet, it need not be the end of the world.We can all learn 'to live with' our embarrassment if we so chose; not want it, fear it, like it, but 'live with it!'

Paradoxically, the best and most proven method of learning to live with potentially embarrassing situations we come across in life is by 'practising them' and thereby 'desensitising ourselves' to their usual effect on us. There have been so many occasions in later life that might have caused me embarrassment at the time, had I not practised many years earlier 'how to live with my embarrassment without it socially immobilising me or making me blush.'

When I was young I had a weak bladder and wet the bed most nights. This wasn't the nicest of experiences for my two younger sisters, as coming from a large family with fewer beds than occupants, the three of us shared a bed until I was ten. My next source of acute embarrassment came in my teens when four friends (myself, two other boys and a girl), became involved in a 'dare'. We decided to streak naked down part of a country lane and across a field which was visible from the main road. We all disrobed and set off laughing loudly. Halfway down the lane, an older, courting couple approached from the opposite direction; and seeing them before I did, my three companions quickly ran behind the hedgerow and hid down in the long grass, leaving me to run past them in my birthday suit.

Have you ever been in the company of an ex-girlfriend or ex-wife and their new partner? There is a moment of potential embarrassment when the eyes of all three first meet, and without one word being exchanged, three lots of telepathic communication are taking place. You look directly at her present partner and give him a smug smile that lets him know 'you were there first'. He places his arm around her in a manner that unmistakenly conveys to you, 'But now she's all mine!', while she looks at you recalling the most memorable moments you once shared. Then reality sinks back in. She looks at you both and thinks, 'Why am I here? What was I doing with him then and why am I with him now? I deserve much better'. Then putting on her coat, she leaves alone as she voices, 'Knobheads, the two of you!'

Before I married my ex-wife, I recall a time we shared a room in a Scottish hotel during our courtship days. It was at the height of our passion and we slept naked. The bathroom was a communal one and was situated immediately across the landing from our room. These were the days when en-suite bathrooms were a luxury known solely to the rich, famous and titled members of society.

Being a couple of strides across the landing, we rose early the following morning and each scurried nakedly the two yards to the bathroom. In our haste to enjoy a shared bath, neither of us had brought a towel. When we finished in the bathroom we found only one towel there. The obvious course was to wrap the towel around the lower half of each of us as we returned to our room across the landing.This equal sharing of the towel offered us some preservation of our dignity.

To our horror, when we went to open our unlocked door, we couldn't. We hadn't left it off the latch and we found ourselves locked out. As the day of mobile phones had not yet arrived, I couldn't phone down to the reception desk and ask someone to come up with a spare key. Just at that moment, two ladies in their sixties (presumably spinsters, elderly sisters or widows), were walking towards us arm in arm, chatting away merrily. I needed to act fast, so I did the only thing that my mother would have advised me to do in the circumstances, the only thing any Irish gentleman would do. I removed the towel around my lower half that was giving me part-protection and draped it over the whole body of my girlfriend, fully preserving her modesty. As the two women passed by, I stood there proudly and simply said, 'Good morning, ladies'. Being ladies of higher breeding, and without seeming to look across at us as they passed by, one simply replied politely in her Miss Marple voice, 'And a very good morning to you two also.' When we entered the dining room for our breakfast half an hour later, guess who was sitting at the next table, each eating a boiled egg with the delicate grace of two old biddies who wouldn't know what 'a dirty weekend' was, even if they found themselves smack in the middle of one!

I was thirty before I changed my profession from mill manager to probation officer. Being an avid reader, I came across a book written by Arnold Allan Lazarus. Lazarus was the most unconventional of workers, but he achieved remarkable results by applying his unusual methods to the most common anxiety-producing problems. He was a South African psychologist, therapist and behaviourist who finished working his later years in America with groups of insecure individuals who became over-embarrassed by their failures and who were always saying and doing the wrong thing.

Lazarus had this marvellous ability to teach people how to 'accept' failure; not necessarily seek it out but to accept it when it came along without rejecting 'self'. Lazarus would set his group members tests and when they got the answers correct, he would mark them wrong. His clients would die with embarrassment on certain occasions and in certain circumstances. So, instead of teaching them ways of avoiding situations which created huge embarrassment, he encouraged them to put their head in the lion's mouth and see how toothless their major fear was.

Lazarus taught them to practise doing the most embarrassing things they could think of until they ceased to be embarrassed in their doing of them. He would give his group clients homework exercises to carry out between one week's group session and the next; teaching them how to reduce and eradicate their levels of embarrassment by repeatedly doing things deliberately that embarrassed them!

His weekly homework exercises would ask group members to walk up and down 52nd Street in rush hour, wearing one red sock, one yellow sock and dressed like a goblin with a two-foot-long feather in their cap and pulling the silliest face they could. During the following group session when Lazarus asked them what happened when they did this highly embarrassing thing amid thousands of passers-by, most reported back, 'Absolutely nothing at all. Everyone just passed by without comment'. A few group members even reported back, 'We made friends!'

Lazarus essentially taught his clients that they could 'immunise themselves against embarrassment' through repeated practice that desensitised their responses. He reminded them that so long as they broke no law and didn't copulate in public view in the front window of Macy's Store, nothing too bad would happen in consequence. They discovered that while they could be arrested and locked up in Sing Sing Prison if they broke the law, nothing at all would happen to them if they did silly things and wore silly clothes in public and generally made a fool of themselves; that is, nothing apart from making friends!

During my many groups that I ran over twenty years, I always used the methods of Arnold Lazarus to reduce embarrassment. Sometimes it might involve group members learning to pull the funniest face they could to a group of strangers upon first being introduced. Not surprisingly, embarrassment prevented most group newcomers being unable to do this. This exercise was an ideal icebreaker as I pointed out that I had no chance of helping any of them change their problematic behaviour if I couldn't teach them how to pull a face at life!

On other occasions, I'd teach people who could not say boo to a goose to open up the window and shout out at the top of their voice the vilest swear word they had ever heard, but would never have voiced in a thousand years, even if they were offered a million pounds to do so. Admittedly, often they'd be hard pushed to start off with a 'damn', but once they'd learned to let themselves go after weeks of training, they rarely finished up with anything less than the 's...', 'b......' or 'f...' word being shouted out the window in their loudest of voices!

Having said all that, I would imagine the most embarrassing thing to happen to anyone is 'dying.' Departing life leaves us all without the ability to further influence it. We become dependent on someone else to dress us properly for our last outing by selecting clothes to our liking for the funeral. Indeed, the day of our funeral is the one occasion when we just know that as soon as we have left the room, they will talk about us for the rest of the day!" William Forde: January 18th, 2018.
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January 17th, 2018

17/1/2018

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​After posting a poem of mine in yesterday's 'Thought for today,' a Facebook contact from the U.S.A. requested that I repost one that I did three years ago about childhood dreams within a wood of innocent play.
 
'A Wood of Childish Dreams' by William Forde.

'A child's dream is nought but God at play
with love-shaped leaves; a woodland day.
Where brown bears climb up branchless trees
and goblins hide within the breeze,
and wrap themselves in candy clouds
while down below bears talk to owls.
That which is found in innocence is never what it seems,
but a wand of magic specialness, a wood of childish dreams.'


Copyright William Forde: January 17th, 2018
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January 16th, 2018

16/1/2018

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I awoke this morning and looked out the window of my bedroom, having prepared my body for snow-covered streets after listening to yesterday's weather forecasts. There was no snow, only the disappointment of damp drizzle. I closed my bedroom curtains and instead opened the window of my imagination and there was spring, just a few months away. I can't wait.
                
​                'That's Spring' by William Forde

"When spring leaves winter standing in the distance
and lupins poke their heads above surrounding tuffs of grass.
That's the time when rambling sweethearts set off walking.

That's the time when ardent sweethearts stop their talking.
That's the time when lover's dew is in the making.
That's the time when happiness is there, just for the taking.
That treasured time, shared between every lad and lass,
amid the silent lupins and surrounding tuffs of grass.
That's the time. That's spring.
"

William Forde: Copyright: January 16th, 2018.
 
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January 15th, 2018.

15/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"There is a moment in every person’s life when time stands still and nothing else matters. It is a time that can never be stolen from the memory or lost amid the chaos of all else around.

A playful child knows a happiness that no adult can ever know because their happiness lies in 'the moment'. Children have this capacity to ‘live in’ and ‘live for’ the moment, but unfortunately, there is a moment in our childhood when the door opens and lets in the big bad wolf. This is when we start to understand that lollipops grow smaller the more they are licked and that all money that comes out of a wall isn't free. It is the moment we grasp that creatures we love will one-day die. It is the moment we start to see a difference between ourselves and other children. This is the moment our childhood innocence is lost, only to return in moments of senile surrender.

As an adult, we should understand that we have choices. We can choose to live in the moment, dream of the future or dwell in the past. It is pointless to wait for a moment; you must experience it, not anticipate it. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that the essence of life can be captured in a moment's insight better than a lifetime's experience and the character of an individual revealed by one simple act. Forever is comprised of the now.

Don't let the moment pass by without tasting the pleasure of all it has to offer, however difficult your circumstances. Even in her housebound prison, Anne Frank knew how magical could be the moment when she wrote, 'How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world'. We were given life from one moment of 'togetherness' shared between our parents and it, therefore, behoves us to find the pleasure, love and goodness in ourselves and our existence.

Take ‘love’ for example. Love is a moment of madness mixed with ecstasy in which we learn that the best way to experience it is to enjoy it. It descends on one with the illusion of being eternal and though we often find it difficult to know where love begins, it is easier to know when it has begun.

From the time I was eleven years old and hungry hormones raged within my growing body, I could hardly wait for the moment when I was wise enough to know why I felt thus and old enough to do something about it. Then, there was the moment of my first real kiss; not that mild touching of lips like the licking of a postage stamp, but nothing less than the promise of a lifetime experienced in the beat of a moment.

How many times after the death of a loved one have we heard the bereaved person say, 'What I wouldn't give for just one more moment of being with them to see them smile…hear them laugh… hold their hand…to tell them that I love them and that I'll never stop loving them'.

Finally, there are those times in our lives that I call our 'moments of wickedness', when we do something wrong and get away with it knowing that punishment will never be delivered for having been clever enough to have committed the perfect crime.

During my first marriage, I loved trees and my wife didn't. In the corner of our back garden was a beautiful sycamore tree of over a hundred years in growth which she was constantly pestering me to get cut down. Being a nature lover, I naturally refused. Upon our subsequent separation and divorce, as I left the matrimonial abode for the final time, she made some snide comment about it being time for the sycamore 'to go also.' This thought angered me immensely. One week later, I had a moment of wicked thought. I contacted my friend Keith who worked in the Planning Department at the Huddersfield Council and between us, we fixed it. One month later, the beautiful sycamore had a 'Preservation Order' on it, forbidding anyone to interfere with its growth and enabling it to grace the back garden of my ex-wife's house for another hundred years! It gave me a wicked sense of pleasure at the moment and for some time afterwards to know that when my ex and the new man in her life next looked out of the window holding hands and saw the sycamore, it would be me who they'd think of.

​'Sheila, what are you doing in that bathroom. You've been there half an hour. Hurry up and come to bed, I've something to show you.'

'Be there in two minutes, Bill.'

'No need to bother hurrying anymore. Take your time; the moment's passed.'" William Forde: January 15th, 2018.

https://youtu.be/9ND3oghPL5M


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January 14th, 2018.

14/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"Once I feared horses until I discovered that the only way to manage my fear was to learn to ride them. And once I learned that I'd been born in the 'Chinese Year of the Horse', I became determined to conquer this fear.

I have feared many things in my life, but fortunately, I have been able to face my fears and eventually manage them. Indeed, I worked with groups for over thirty years, showing hundreds of people how to best deal with fears levels that had ruined their lives and destroyed all opportunity of them socially mixing.

There are so many fears in any person's life that it would take a lifetime to itemise them all. Some are 'rational' and are more easily dealt with, while most are 'Irrational' and require specific techniques being practised such as Systematic Desensitisation, Relaxation Training, and Breathing and Mind control to deal with. 

For the purpose of today's post, I mention the earliest fear I can recall. It was a fear that stayed with me all through my childhood and into adult life. Indeed, I would retain my earliest fear until I was almost 60-years-old, but it produced its greatest level of anxiety and daily disruption for me during the years of my first marriage.

My earliest fear was being in debt. During the first 21 years of my life, I saw my mother, who had seven children, pay for this week's family food with next week's wages. Mum lived on tick until all her children had grown up and had started to earn enough to feed and clothe themselves.

When I initially got married, I swore that I would never go into debt. Despite being better off than the average couple and having three times the average monies coming into the house weekly (I was a mill manager and my wife was a teacher), I still couldn't dispel that fearful cloud of debt which had become so familiar a sight in my development. I soon learned that the more you earn the more you spent, and by God my wife certainly knew how to spend! These were the late 1960s when the aspiration of all successful people involved 'Keeping up with the Joneses. It was also the time when the Bank Manager would personally send you a letter informing you when your account went in the red by sixpence or more, and then had the brass nerve to charge another seven shillings and sixpence to your overdrawn account for having written the letter!

I started to fear that I still hadn't escaped from this vicious cycle of debt, and I started to think of ways of dealing with the problem. I knew that my mother had no choice in her decision to get into debt, as my mining father earned less weekly wage than it cost to feed a wife and seven children on bread and jam for breakfast and potatoes for dinner. Her choice was the easiest one of her life to make; to get into debt or to see her children starve!

Two things worthy of mention here, before the 'Equality and Equal Right's Brigade' come down on me like at ton of bricks. The decision to accrue debt was mum's and not dad's. That was simply the way things were done in those days. Each house only had one parent worker outside it to bring in a regular wage, and that was dad. Mum looked after her large family, cooked, cleaned, washed, darned, ironed etc, as well as looking after all household monies and its management. She couldn't control how much dad earned and neither could he, as he worked all the overtime he could get, plus Saturday mornings. He would also volunteer to work during his two week's annual holiday period. The only decision mum had to make was, did the family go into debt or did she watch us starve?

Dad was the breadwinner. He earned the money and gave it to mum to do with it what she decided was best for the family. It was mum's job to 'magic it' and spend it! Mum always needed to make economies wherever possible. That usually meant that her children and husband had one meal a day while she did without!


Sociology students please note that in the 1960s, and dating back many centuries, the main meal of the day was the 'dinner', which my family ate at noon, not evening. It would seem that whether you ate dinner at noon or in the evening determined one of the main differences that distinguished the working classes from their 'betters'; the middle and upper classes!

With regard to looking for household economies, there were no places that mum could cut back her expenses; we already got maximum use from the second-hand clothes she bought us at jumble sales for us to wear daily and to put back on our bed at night time to keep us warm as we slept. Come to think of it now, mum probably was a better manager of finance than the best Chancellor this country ever had.

So my mum did what she thought necessary for the family to survive: the same thing every other mum in our situation did at the time: she made friends with the rent man, the tally man and the local grocer, Harry Hodgeson, and she kept on their good side for the next twenty years.


Whereas debt was the 'Hobson's Choice' my mum made when we were growing up, all debt accrued during my first marriage was to provide a lifestyle way above our means, just to keep up with the 'Jones'.

Eventually, I decided to take a leaf out of mum's book to address the problem as my wife showed no sign of not spending what we didn't have in the future. So I did a 'Tommy Cooper' and turned the bank manager from 'acquaintance' into 'friend'. This became relatively easy as we attended the same church and we started having a coffee together after Sunday Mass.Those overdrawn letters from my bank manager stopped once we became the closest of buddies. He even gave me a £2000 overdraft facility (which was virtually unknown in 1970), without me asking for one, just to avoid further difficulties after he retired and a new bank manager was installed at the Cleckheaton branch.


After many years of accumulating debt, I got rid of the debt essentially by getting rid of my wife. There are many ways of dealing effectively with high fear levels today that were not available to my mother in her day, but I must admit that the way she managed to live with her fear of debt did provide me with a way to manage debt during my first marriage, by becoming pally with the bank manager!" William Forde: January 14th, 2018.
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January 13th, 2018.

13/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"The young are always threatening to leave home as soon as they realise that there is a great big world out there beyond the garden wall where the grass grows greener. Young or old, however, when we run away, we are usually running away from self and consequences.

I remember the first time I left home. I was 5-years-old and had decided that three days at first school was long enough for me and that life was too short to be stuck in a stuffy classroom from 9.00 am to 3.00 pm, especially with the 'old dragon' of a teacher, Mrs Walsh, who loved to sneak up behind and whack you on the head with a blackboard rubber just for looking at Gloria Campbell. I managed to travel about half a mile before some interfering adult turned me into the police.

I was 6-years-old when I next packed my case and took off for the hills. The local bobby found me three hours later. I'd got lost in a field half a mile away from home base. When I was 7-years-old I ran away by jumping on the back of a coal lorry after my dad belted me for stealing twopence from my mum's purse. The driver found me covered by an old sack to avoid detection and turned me into the cops when he stopped in Heckmondwike.I ran away from school again at the age of 8 years when Winifred Healey decided that our relationship of boyfriend/girlfriend had run its course and that she intended to marry spotty faced Tony Walker instead when she grew up.

I have to say that I found running away to be easy, but it was not knowing what to do next that usually brought me back home. I would sneak back upstairs and unpack in the hope that my mother hadn't noticed me gone.

Paradoxically, the more I think about it, the more I realise that 'running away' is a kind of 'unhealthy stillness' and that it represents an act of avoiding the consequences of life, plus an unwillingness to move on with one's life by having the guts to stay put and see things through to their bitter end.

In fact, it could be argued that writing is a form of 'running away' from the realities of life, and perhaps it is? Perhaps all authors are little more than petty liars with vivid imaginations who are unable to write more than half a dozen lines of fact before starting to make things up?

As my dear mother used to tell me when I was a child, 'Billy, home is where the heart is. Your home resides in you and like a tortoise, you take it with you wherever you go. You can never run away from home because you can never run away from yourself.'

It was perhaps somewhat ironic that I spent the bulk of my working life running groups for problematic people who avoided dealing with life, These were people whose constant answer when asked why they were changing house, partner or job again would invariably reply, 'I can't stand it...I can't stand it!'


If ever there was such a meaningless excuse for anything, saying 'I can't stand it...I can't stand it!' is the prime one. As the person who doesn't like this or that is whining, ' Oh, I can't stand it...I can't stand it!', they may not be wanting it, liking it etc, but the one thing they are demonstrably doing as they are moaning and whining is 'standing it'. As the American therapist Lazarus used to tell his clients, 'You can stand anything until you are dead; then it's your corpse that's standing it!''

So it matters not what your response to your problem happens to be, whether moving house, getting divorced, having an affair, changing occupations, leaving home, or even getting married; sometimes, these can all be ways of taking 'I can't stand it...I can't stand it' from one situation to the next.


So the next time you and your partner are making mad, passionate love at 3.00 am in the early morning and she is screaming, ' Oh, Fred, I can't stand it...I can't stand it!', in ascending moans of ecstasy, you should tell that whatever she does, she must stick with it and all will turn out well." William Forde: January 13th, 2018.
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January 12th, 2018.

12/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"Isn't it marvellous that given all of the beautiful and exotic flowers there are in the world to choose from, it is our most common species that are chosen to express our love between the years of childhood and adult. Flowers are words of love that even a child understands. To the child, the earth laughs in flowers. From the earliest of ages, they pick flowers from the hedgerows and the fields for their mothers.

To a child, those more simple flowers like daisies, cowslips, bluebells, dandelions, daffodils are the earliest in their memories.

The first attraction all children find within the floral world is with the small white flowers that can be found in common grass, wild fields and meadowland in abundance, and which they fashion into daisy chains with tiny hands of love. Such is often the very first gift of nature that is made by the fingers of a fascinated child that is given to a loving mum. The best reminder that we adults could have is to give our mother flowers when she is alive and able to smell them instead of when she is dead. It is as if children can sense that every flower is but a soul blossoming in nature; a thing that smells far sweeter in its first fragrance than when it is pressed between the pages of a book in recollection.

The fashioning of daisy chains during early childhood is sequentially followed by the discovery of the buttercup that is placed beneath the chin to reflect one's character. Then, in our years of growing passion, the dandelion becomes the determinant to measure the likelihood that exists in the heart of another; 'He loves me...He loves me not.... He loves me..........He loves me not......'
Then last, but not least, we should not forget the bloom that is probably the world's favourite and which is given in the most tender of moments to the ones we love; my mother's favourite, the red rose. Whereas a grown man seeking to impress his love may shower his sweetheart in profusion, every smart child knows that one red rose says more than a dozen could ever say.

Being the world's greatest lover of the red rose, my late mother frequently waxed lyrical whenever she received one from me. She would often quote a once-read phrase, 'A single rose can be my garden, and a single friend my world.'

When I started working in the mill at the age of 15 years, I made it a practice never to arrive home on a wage night without calling to the estate nursery and buying my mother a single red rose or a small bunch of flowers she liked. It would give her such pleasure to receive so small a gesture and upon receiving them, she would press her lips to my hand and her nose to the rose and say, ’You’re a good lad, Billy’.

In later years after she had died, I once read, 'Fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose', and as I read those words I fondly remembered my mother’s habit of smelling her red rose and pressing her nose to my hand in a tender kiss of gratitude.

Ah... how the simplicity of the common flowers shape our character and determine our fate." William Forde: January 11th, 2018


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January 11th, 2018

11/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"I have had many dogs in my time and while I remember them all fondly, I never thought that I would miss the passing of one as much as I miss 'Lady', the rough collie that shared the life of Sheila and myself until she died on the 19th, September 2016. My mind was active in bed last night so I came downstairs for a few hours. As I ate a slice of comfort toast, topped with my favourite marmalade and whisky jam that a lovely lady called Anne makes me, I forgot momentarily as I'm prone to do these days and handed the last piece to Lady in her spot at the side of the table where she sat most of the days as Sheila and me worked on our laptops.

I have often heard of people seeing loved ones who have died in their favourite chair or place in the house, and while my mind frequently goes to deceased loved ones, they usually remain wholly imaginary and never appear in the third dimension or any other lifelike vision. Anyway, as I was obviously thinking of our faithful dog early this morning, I looked up some photographs we have and thought I would use a poem I wrote as a eulogy to her on the day she died on September 19th, 2016 as my 'Thought for today'.



​'Watch over us in gratitude' by William Forde.
(Copyright: William Forde: September 19th, 2016)
'
'It's very hard to be one's best,
to have a mind that will not rest.
Be sustained by bones that only ache,
to pulsate a heart that wants to break;
yet, have the knowledge from above,
to know that those we truly love
will never leave us, never die,
instead, will roam above on high,
and watch over us in gratitude.'

William Forde: January 11th, 2018.
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January 10th, 2018.

10/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"In every living being, there is the desire to love and be loved in return. The strongest and most enduring of all love is the love which is not afraid to show its vulnerability or demonstrate its fragility. When we love, we reflect the best we have to offer and when we fall in love, we more readily recognise ourselves in another.

Finding love is nothing less than emptying life's treasure chest and discovering its most precious jewel at the bottom. I learned very early on in my life that without having someone or something to love in this world, nothing seems to make sense or is born of purpose. Knowing that someone loves you gives you constant strength to do all that requires doing, while loving another gives you the courage to face all that life brings into play.

Love rarely comes into one's life in a blare of trumpets announcing its arrival. It is more likely to sneak up on you when least expected; often making its presence felt after it has landed and taken off again.

When I first met Sheila, I didn't see stars in my eyes. In fact, when I first saw her, I wasn't particularly looking for some woman to be a part of my life again. I'd been hurt and was still emotionally fragile. I sat down next to her and started a polite conversation. She naturally found me interesting enough to carry on talking and secretly looking me over whenever she thought my eyes were elsewhere.

As we fenced around each other’s character traits, looking for areas of compatibility or irreconcilable differences, my prime concern was a physical one. Sheila’s hair was too short in length, too butch in appearance. Given her bone structure of the face, she came across as a woman of extreme beauty who was hiding away her most attractive of features. That thought got me thinking what else she might be hiding.On Sheila’s part, what most concerned her initially was the 14-year age gap between us, especially having been widowed at the early age of fifty.

We can honestly say that it wasn't a love at first sight that bowled either of us over, though there was a strange sense of feeling that touched both of us, a feeling which wouldn't let go when we parted. Only one day apart from that first meeting between us, and we couldn't stop thinking about each other. We each knew that we had met someone who stirred our emotions in such manner that they would never settle again until we next met. It was as if during our first meeting we had invisibly magnetised to each other and were simply unable to draw ourselves apart thereafter.

Unknown to each of us, during that first week after meeting, we fell in love, and we both smiled more secretly and a little softer because we knew it to be so. Coming together effectively demonstrated that new love heals the broken bark of past hurt and bruised emotions.

We instinctively knew that declaring our love for each other after so short a time was undoubtedly brave, if not foolhardy, but we also knew that being loved back in equal measure was so beautiful. It made the risk of declaring our true feelings to the world worth taking.

In the briefest of moments, two imperfect strangers, each one carrying some emotional baggage, suspended all doubt and placed their faith on a higher plane as they dared to reach out for love again.

​We dared to love again. We dared to share a love and a life that held a physical, emotional and spiritual dimension; with no part representing more or less importance than the other two. We met in 2010, we married in 2012 and before 2013 arrived, I’d been diagnosed with a terminal blood cancer.What we got was a lifetime's experience compressed into more love and satisfaction than any creature deserves or needs to feel fulfilled.

Having often spoken together about our first meeting, Sheila and I have to acknowledge that for us, love never happened in an instant; that cupid never struck within that first exchange of glances. We learned that love isn't always courageous and bold, and that it sometimes creeps up on you when your emotions are least guarded, and turns your life upside down before you know it's happened.

Our marriage has taught us that love warms all waking moments, lightens the heaviest of burdens, opens wide our capacity to dream and makes all manner of things possible together that we would have struggled to achieve alone.

Though dreams are lost, dreams are not forgotten, and soon we’re back to stern reality. ’Get that tea on woman, your man’s back home!’ ‘Get your own brew, you lazy git. I’ve been out working all day. Just cos’ you retired from your job twenty years ago, doesn’t mean you retired from all responsibility!’ Ah, married life. Who’d be without it?" William Forde: January 10th, 2016.
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January 9th, 2018

9/1/2018

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"What a difference six months can make in one's life. Not having to visit hospital weekly for blood transfusions since my last course of chemotherapy ended in June 2017 has been a tremendous relief. It has essentially taken my mind completely off the fact that I am dying, and that although stabilised for the present, there is currently no known cure for my medical condition. My cancer will return at a future date and make me go a few extra rounds in the ring of remembrance, just to let me know that it is still there and hasn't forgotten me.

Before the recent improvement of my daily condition and I stopped needing regular blood transfusions, I frequently became short of oxygen and my energy levels were often too low to move around freely without a shortage of breath. It took a couple of pints of blood to put a bounce back in my stride. I became so good at reading my body signs at the time that I knew to the day and hour when a blood transfusion became essential to my continued survival.

Having a terminal illness necessitates one learning more and more about one's own body in order to affect proper monitoring and thereby receive the help one needs as soon as one needs it. My overall improvement in well-being over the past seven months has basically involved establishing through trial and error, a number of life routines that work for me.

An old spinster friend and mother substitute of mine was a lovely lady called, Henrietta (affectionately known by her friends as Etta). Etta lived until she was 94 years of age, and during her last ten years, I became the son she always wanted but never had. She kept herself in robust health until the last six months of her life. When I once asked her what she put her longevity down to, she indicated three things. First was her belief in God, the second was the fact that she'd never married and hadn't to 'do' for a husband, and the third was establishing a regular routine of eating, sleeping and exercise.

Incidentally, I find the 'marriage thing' interesting, especially as recent surveys have shown that married men live longer than single men, but that married women die sooner than spinsters. It looks like Etta was on to something when she made that life choice to remain single, following the death of her soldier sweetheart during the 'Second World War'.

I can also endorse Etta's belief regarding the importance of dietary, sleeping and exercise routines in one's life. In fact, were I not in the process of dying, I'd be tempted to make a health and fitness video, going by the significant progress I have made over the past six months.

I have found that establishing an overall lifestyle and group of routines that I religiously follow has been a tremendous source of help to my physical wellbeing. As significantly, my return to always having a new novel to write on the go is also of importance in maintaining my mental health, and I won't deny that being more spiritually connected with my God has been the most comforting of reassurances for me during troubled times.

Some of the most difficult routines I have had to put into practice have been establishing the places, nature of activities and types of people to avoid, in order to maintain my present quality of life. It is ironic that the type of human I most love being with (children), has become the most dangerous type of human species I can now associate with, having no immune system with which to fight off their bugs, colds and other illnesses that is normal for children to get so that they can build up their own immune system. While all this observance can seem a pain in the arse, to keep the show on the road makes it all essential and worthwhile.

Indeed, when I think back since I discovered I had a fatal illness, I have learned so much about the functioning of my own body that I would feel comfortable in taking a medical/biological examination today and passing it with flying colours. I know that I would have no trouble at all in passing a first-class honours degree in 'Me'.

I have had medical problems and constant body pain since the age of twelve and my involvement in a road accident, when a large lorry ran over me and wrapped my body around its main axle, almost killing me in the process and leaving me unable to walk for three years. I needed over fifty operations on my legs during the immediate years after and have been troubled with arthritic pain all my life.

From the many problems I have seen over the decades, I can readily understand how anyone afflicted by any physical, psychological or mental ailment can benefit from the assistance, companionship and help of another. Indeed, I have seen such help in action all my working life as a probation officer, relaxation trainer and stress management counsellor. I know that such relationships can help a person find themselves, but no outsider can truly know you inside out like only yourself can!

I know that we are all different in the ways we react and respond to problem situations, but a part of me will always find it strange to fully understand why any person needs to go for help to another 'in order to learn more about themselves'?

At the end of the day, I do believe that nobody can ever truly know us as well as we know ourselves. True, we may often try to deny and deceive others and ourselves as to the truth of who we are or why we think and do this. But deep down, none can deceive oneself about the 'me' who we have each lived with all of our lives, and therefore have known longest and best.

I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best, the fountain and source of my experiences and the poet of my own vision. I have seen the sea when it is wild and stormy; I have watched it quiet and serene, even when it is moody and unpredictable. In all my moods, I see myself for what I am and have become. In all moods, I find myself and know that I am me." William Forde: January 9th, 2018.
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January 8th, 2018

8/1/2018

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Thought for today:
"I was very pleased when I learned that Barry Gibb, had been awarded a Knighthood in the recent New Years Honours list. I have always liked the songs by the Bee Gees, but have held a special place for Barry singing, 'It's only words'. I especially find the last line of the song so meaningful: 'It's only words and words are all I have to take your heart away.' Oh, if only men knew how true that statement is!

The Irish love their glass of Guinness but take it from me, they value the words that come out of their mouths more than the drink that enters it. Many English ladies who are enraptured and ensnared by their words ascribe their success to 'The Blarney'. Let me tell you, ladies, forget those traditional jokes about 'the thick Irishman' because it ain't 'The Blarney', it's 'The Brain'. The Irish man has always prized the use of words, especially in the courtship stakes. He has always known which part of a woman to stroke first to command their undivided attention; that's why their ego is first on the list! Some women like complimenting on their attractive looks, some on their intelligence and others on their independence of mind, but whatever floats their boat, a bit of well-chosen flattery rarely goes astray. The thing never to forget though is that when it comes to finding love, every woman has a heart to lose along the way; and in my estimation, words are more capable of stealing it and keeping it than any other kind of snatch and grab!

Having listened to the Bee Gees' song again, my mind went to a number of consequences a word can mean, not just in the courtship stakes, but in the popularity poll and in the race of life. After some thought, I came up with a few choice examples where adding, subtracting or changing one word can make a significant difference to one's intent, actions and result.

Just as the words that all of us long to hear like, 'I love you' or 'Please be mine' tend to be grouped in threes, the words that we never want to hear are invariably grouped in fours. Words that say things like, 'I don't love you...You will die soon...I found someone else.....You can't have children... Let's just be friends...I never loved you....etc.'

Ever since time began, there have always been occasions when so much hung upon the difference that a single word can make like Yes or No... Will or Won't...Shall or Shan't...Can or Can't. Either adding or subtracting a word can make a considerable difference to the happiness of another and their sense of importance and self-worth.

So if you want to make a difference to the next person who comes knocking on your door, upon meeting them don't just politely say, 'Can I help you', but instead change the emphasis completely by adding just one more word, 'How can I help you?' The first illustration indicates that you are willing to while the latter states firmly that you want to!" William Forde: January 8th, 2018.

https://youtu.be/Iy_bJelwa0c
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January 7th, 2018.

7/1/2018

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Thought for today:

'If we must part' by William Forde

"In the pain of separation I lose myself and all my thoughts turn back to you.
If we must part, then let it be for the briefest of moments and the best of reasons. 
Let it be with dignified authority and not in angry silence, unkind thought or bitter haste.
Instead, let all our parting be but a mere prelude to your sweet return when I can feel you brush my hands once more."

William Forde: Copyright: January 7th, 2018.


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