Blog Archives - FordeFables

Song For Today: 31st January 2020

31/1/2020

BREXIT

Today we leave the European Union. Any view I hold upon the matter, matters not. However, it would be churlish of me to allow such an important day in the pages of British History to be turned without any acknowledgement of its passing. Whether you were a ’Leaver’ or a ‘Remainer’ at the Referendum stage no longer matters as much as being able to positively move forward as an individual, a community, a country, and a British person. The nation now needs to heal and not have salt rubbed into its wounds by constantly living in and dwelling on the past. As a Southern Irish citizen who has lived in England for 73 years of my 77-year life, I love this country which has given me and my family the best of lives, and I wish it well in its future as an independent nation. I worry not how Brexit regards my own future status as a Southern Irish citizen and a British subject, as my security comes from within me, not without. We all can be proud of our country without the need to wrap ourselves in its National Flag or desiring to never see our flag fly higher than half-mast.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 30th January 2020

30/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to two Facebook friends, Rita Power, who hails from Portlaw (the village of my birth) and currently lives in County Waterford in Ireland, and Chris Brennan from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Both Rita and Chris celebrate their birthdays today. We wish them both a very happy day and trust that they will leave room for lots of cake and suitable refreshments. Thank you both for being my Facebook friends. Bill x

Today’s song is ‘You’re So Vain’. This song was written in 1971 by Carly Simon and was released in November 1972. It is one of the songs that Carly Simon is most identified with, and upon its release, it reached Number 1 in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The song is ranked at Number 92 on ‘Billboard’s Greatest Songs of All Time’. ‘You're So Vain’ was voted Number 216 in RIAA’S Songs of the Century’, and in August 2014, the UK's ‘Official Charts Company’ crowned it the ultimate song of the 1970s.

The song is a critical profile of a self-absorbed lover about whom Simon asserts "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." The title subject's identity has long been a matter of speculation, with Simon stating that the song refers to three men, only one of whom she has named publicly, actor Warren Beatty.

The song was initially entitled ‘Bless You, Ben’. The first words were: "Bless you, Ben. You came in when nobody else left off." Simon felt dissatisfied with the lyrics and put the song away until she attended a party one night where a famous guest appeared. A friend told Simon the male guest entered as if he was "walking onto a yacht". Simon incorporated the words into the melody of "Bless You, Ben" as she was composing on her piano, and the song took on a whole new meaning.

Before the song became a hit single in 1972, Simon told an interviewer that the song was about ‘men’ of a certain type, not a specific ‘man’. In 1983, she said the song was not about Mick Jagger who contributed uncredited backing vocals to it.

Over the years Simon has teased the people attempting to identify the ‘men’ the song was referring to. She divulged ‘letter clues’ and has claimed that the subject's name contains the letters ‘A, E, and R’ In August 2003, Simon agreed to reveal the name of the song's subject to the highest bidder of the ‘Martha’s Vineyard Possible Dreams Charity Auction’. With the top bid of $50,000, (Dick Ebersol, president of NBC Sports, and a friend of Simon), won the right to know the name of the subject of ‘You're So Vain’. A condition of the prize was that Ebersol would not reveal the name. In a 2007 interview, Warren Beatty said, "Let's be honest. That song was about me."

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Let’s face it, folks, the song is about every vain man on the planet. I know from my own personal life experience that it was about me during the entirety of my teenage years, and if I am entirely truthful, up until my early thirties. In fact, if I was to identify the most objectional character flaw which I possess, a lack of modesty would have to come out at the top of the list.

While I must praise my mother for most of any good qualities of character I possess, I also hold her personally responsible for promoting a baser side of me. Two months into my mother’s pregnancy with me (I was her firstborn of seven children), she was courting my father who lived in County Kilkenny; thirty miles away. My mother lived at the home of her parents in Portlaw, County Waterford (the house where I would be born). She was the oldest of seven children born to her parents. My father would cycle into Portlaw once a week to meet my mum, behind her parent’s back.

At the time, only mum knew that she was pregnant. She had planned to tell my father when they next met and because she wasn’t yet showing that she was an expectant mother, she had not told her own parents. She planned to tell my maternal grandparents after informing my father.

One day, while my mum was doing some chores at her parent’s house, my mother told me that a visiting Romany traveller knocked on the back door. She was in the house alone and the Romany was selling pegs.

To understand the Irish, one must first accept that they are a race seeped in superstition, religion, little people, and prophecy. One of their oldest superstitions is ‘never to turn away a true Romany visitor to one’s home empty-handed’. Whether the Romany was touting their fortune-telling talents or wanting to sell the house occupier wooden pegs for the washing line, not to buy their product or engage their service, is tantamount to inviting bad luck and ill health for seven years.

The travelling peg-selling Romany gave my mother the pegs she’d bought for a silver sixpence. The Romany then said to my mother, “For an extra shilling, missus, I’ll tell you about the special child that you’re having!”. Her knowledge of my mother’s pregnancy took mum off guard and naturally, she wanted to hear all about this ‘special child’ of hers. So, mum told me that she gave the Romany traveller her last shilling.

Mum’s account of what follows went like this. The Romany told her she would have seven children in total and that her firstborn would be a son. The Romany also prophesised that mum’s first child would be ‘a special child’. Mum was over the moon. Which mother to be wouldn’t be, I ask you? Show me the mum who doesn’t believe that her child is ‘special’ and I’ll show you a part-time mother who has yet to bond with her offspring.

My parents were duly married (prior to my birth of course), but over the following three to four years, they were often separated. Dad was a man born to a large family who lived in extreme poverty. Dad left school at the age of twelve to earn a living. His educational learning was severely limited, but what my father lacked in educational attainment, he more than made up for in his ability to play football (or soccer as the Irish call it). Over the latter years that my parents courted, followed by their early marriage, my father played soccer for County Kilkenny, and he later went on to play for first and second teams of the Irish National Squad.

When I was aged 4 years old, mum, dad, me and my two sisters migrated to West Yorkshire. The purpose was to have a more prosperous life. I must point out that during the late 1930s and early 40s, Irish footballers who played for their country did not receive any wage. They did it out of national pride and the only cash they received was travelling expenses. Hard to believe today that the glory of playing sport at the highest level then seemed reward enough, especially when current professional footballers earn the wages of successful film stars and business moguls.

When we arrived in West Yorkshire, my dad got a job at the coal face as a miner and we lived in a one-bedroomed tied cottage. After five years in West Yorkshire, we moved to a brand-new council house with three bedrooms, a ceramic fixed bath (instead of a tin tub), and an inside and outside lavatory which didn’t have to be shared with the neighbours. After giving birth to seven children, mum eventually stopped being a baby production factory to increase the Catholic population count.

Every day of my childhood and teenage life, my mother told me she loved me, and never a day went by without her reminding me that I was ‘a special child’. As time went on my mother told and retold the tale to me about the peg-selling gypsy who had foretold my birth and had gone on to pronounce that I would be ‘a special child.’ Now, there isn’t a boy on the planet who wouldn’t like to be told by their mother daily as they grew up, that they were ‘special’, and I was no exception. My mother believed I was indeed ‘special’ and never let me forget it. In time, the more my mother believed I was ‘special’, and told me so, the easier it was for me to believe the Romany’s prophesy also.

As I grew up, every unusual thing that I did or which happened to me, was because ‘I was special’. When I was knocked down and run over by a large wagon, and survived horrendous injuries, my mother believed I lived because ‘I was special’. Having been told by the medics that I’d never walk again after damaging my spine, and then being able to walk again three years later, was because ‘I was special’. When my Mensa test score came back as being 142 at the age of twelve years, my mother said it was because ‘I was special’ and when I became the youngest shop steward in Great Britain at the age of 18 years, that also was because ‘I was special’. Becoming a Mill Manager at the age of 26 years merely reaffirmed my ‘specialness’ in my mother’s eyes. Everything good I did from my childhood until the day she died in 1986, my mother believed it was because ‘I was special’.

What a lucky son I was. I knew I was much loved by my mother and I grew up believing that I was indeed ‘special’. My ‘specialness’ had been purchased by a peg-selling Romany fortune teller for the price of sixpence in Portlaw during the year of 1942.’ My ‘specialness’ had then been conferred upon me by my mother as a growing and impressionable boy, and everything good or unusual I did in my life thereafter was (according to my mother), because ‘I was special’. I’m only glad today that the travelling peg-selling Romany didn’t tell my mother that her firstborn would be a reincarnation of the Christ child!

For the first twenty-five years of my life, I truly believed that ‘I was special’ and this feeling of ‘specialness’ that constantly resided inside me led me to do what I now believe was ‘ordinary’ things in the most ‘extraordinary’ and ‘special’ of ways. The second twenty-five period of my life between 25 and 50 led to me reaffirming that I was indeed ‘special’ and that my mother was accurate in her belief, BUT SO IS EVERYONE ELSE SPECIAL WHO LIVES AND BREATHES! The past twenty-seven years of my life (50-77) has led to me doing everything humanly possible to persuade, convince and reaffirm all people whom I am capable of influencing of their own unique ‘specialness’.

When I became an author and had many dozens of books published, Sheila persuaded me to write some romantic novels after we met. While I have stopped writing novels now, I did write and have another fourteen novels published under the umbrella title of ‘Tales from Portlaw’. The last book I wrote (and probably the last book I shall ever write) told the story of the Romany traveller who foresaw my birth when my mother was two months pregnant with me, and who prophesied to my mother that I would be the oldest of seven children and that I would be a ‘special’ child. It is fitting that an event that was to shape my life should form the subject of my final published book. The book is entitled ‘The Postman Always Knocks Twice’ and can be purchased in either e-book format or hardback copy from Amazon (all sale profits going to charity in perpetuity). The full story can also be freely read from accessing my website below:
http://www.fordefables.co.uk/lsquothe-postman-always-knocks…

Over my lifetime, and until I entered my thirties, I was highly opinionated. I believed myself to be better than I was. I held myself in high esteem and displayed a degree of confidence and a constant air of arrogance which puffed me with pride. I obviously possessed enough good character traits that offset my less favourable traits, otherwise, I would have proven wholly insufferable to my friends and work colleagues. At the time, I put these unattractive characteristics of mine down to having too high a standard in my work ethic and too unrealistic a level of expectation in others to succeed. I now realise that my high work standards and high expectations of clients to succeed were a sword with a double-edged blade. While, on one hand, it produced better than the average success rates with my clients, it must have also produced a greater level of disappointment in the feelings of those clients who had unable to significantly change for the better!

Back to my father’s influence on me. When I was a growing boy, I too became a football fanatic before my accident which crippled me at the age of eleven years of age. Inside our lounge was a framed photograph on the wall which I must have passed thirty times daily without knowing what it represented. I never knew until my tenth year of life that the man in the centre of the photograph holding the football was my father. Dad had been the Captain of the Irish Second National Soccer Squad. Dad later went on to play for the First Team of his Country.

On the day I discovered that my father had been an exceptional footballer, I was going to school and I was looking forward to the school football game later that afternoon. The school had recently purchased a new football strip but the shirt cost each team member £2: 10 shillings. This was a great deal of money for a poor household and amounted to 25 per cent of my father’s weekly wage then. Naturally, the fact that my parents couldn’t afford to buy me the new school football shirt in green and white square pattern disappointed me, but I understood. I was about to leave the house when my father asked me to hang about a minute. Dad then went upstairs and returned with a man’s green football shirt that had a white collar. It belonged to the Irish National Soccer team which he’d played for as a young man in his twenties. That shirt swamped me and went down beyond my knees, but that afternoon there wasn’t a boy footballer in the whole wide world who was as proud as me running aground the pitch in the team shirt of the Irish Soccer Squad.

Four months after this incident, my dad went on a rare two-week holiday on his own to the home of the Brennans’ in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Micky and Ann Brennan had effectively reared my father during the teenage years of his development, and it was while living with Micky Brennan and his wife, Ann, that my father was selected to play soccer for the ‘Kilkenny County Soccer Team’. Not only did my father play for County Kilkenny, but he was regarded as one of the best soccer players Kilkenny ever had. Over a four year period, my dad progressed from playing for his county to playing for his country, besides holding down a fulltime job during the weekdays.

Two weeks after my father returned from his rare Irish break, we received a newspaper cutting from the Kilkenny press. It told of my father’s recent return to Kilkenny. The press cutting it rated my father as one of Kilkenny’s best-ever footballers and it also reported that my father’s arrival in Kilkenny was celebrated by a brass-band reception which met him off the coach and marched him up to the home of the Ann and Micky Brennan where he was staying.

During the first nine years of my life, my mother would sometimes speak about having been a football widow most weekends of her early married life but never elaborated on this by informing me that my father had played soccer for his County before going on to play soccer for his country. And as to my father, he never said a word either about his footballing past. In fact, when he came back off his Irish holiday with the Brennans, when asked by my mum how his holiday break had gone, his reply was a simple “Okay”. If Micky and Ann Brennan hadn’t sent across the newspaper cutting of his Irish stay with them, informing us of the brass-band welcome he’d received upon his arrival in County Kilkenny, we never would have known the hero’s welcome and reception that the dignitaries of County Kilkenny gave him.

My father was the most modest man I ever knew; a trait, he sadly never passed down to me. I often wondered how such a modest and humble man could have spawned a son with the conceit I possessed and was always willing to wrap myself in. Instead, I was left to my mother’s influences and until my mid-twenties, I believed that I was simply the bee’s knees when it came to romance, fighting in the streets, dancing, singing, or simply ‘being me’. There wasn’t a vainer teenager than I was in the whole of West Yorkshire when I got dolled up for the Saturday Night Townhall Dance! The clothes I wore were the most fashionable; they were bespoke suits that had been cut and tailored from the most expensive cloth. I’d bought my male wardrobe with my own hard-earned money and I wore each garment with the utmost pride. My white shirts would be ironed and perfectly creased down the sleeves, and my fine leather-soled shoes would be polished until they reflected my handsome face in them, looking back up at me wherever I strutted my thing.

And yet, there is nothing that I wouldn’t have given to have had a mere tenth of my dear father’s modesty, along with his football ability.

Have a good day, everyone. Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 29th January 2020

29/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my dear friend, Bob Dudley, from Birstall in West Yorkshire and my Facebook friend, Nancy Maher, from Carrick-on-Suir. Both Bob and Nancy celebrate their birthday today. May their special day be memorable, and I hope that they leave plenty of room for lots of cake and suitable refreshments. Have a super birthday. Bill xx

My song today is ‘I’ve Gotta Get A Message to You’. This is a song by the ‘Bee Gees’ and was released as a single on 7 September 1968. It was their second Number 1 single on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ and their first US Top 10 hit.

The song is about a man who, awaiting his execution in the electric chair, begs the prison chaplain to pass a final message on to his wife. Robin Gibb, who wrote the lyrics, said that the man's crime was the murder of his wife's lover, though the lyrics do not explicitly allude to the identity of the victim. Robin said, "This is about a prisoner on ‘Death Row’ who only has a few hours to live. He wants the prison chaplain to pass on a final message to his wife. There's a certain urgency about it.

The song was written with Percy Sledge in mind to record it. Sledge did record it in February 1970 but ‘Atlantic Records’ did not issue his version in the United States at the time.

The song was the group's second UK Number 1 single and also went to Number 1 in Ireland and reached Number 8 in the United States. It was their first top-ten hit in the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ charts.

"I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You" has appeared in five versions all made from the same recording, but heard at three different speeds, faded out at three different points, and with different elements mixed forward.

In 2011, ‘The Soldiers’ recorded the song with Robin Gibb for the Royal British Legion's annual charity single. It was released on 23 October 2011 in the United Kingdom on iTunes and reached Number 75 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’. A music video to accompany the release of "I've Gotta Get A Message To You" was first released onto YouTube on 13 October 2011.

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As the author of over sixty published books, the title of this song has always intrigued me. The writing, postage and arrival of a letter offer so many opportunities within a novel, along with the failure of never writing or receiving a letter communication that could change your life.

Today, letter writing would rarely be the communication method we tend to use, especially when we have ready access to phones, mobiles, computers, and trains and planes which can cross the country in a matter of hours. No more do we have to sit down at the table and compose a letter that means what we say when we can say what we mean by means of skype across the world and face-to-face and say it within minutes. It may not be many decades away before mankind is able to say what they want to whomever they want to say it without even opening their mouths and sounding a word. All future communication in our ‘Brave New World’ will probably be achievable by thought transference.

After all, that is what one’s behaviour and response pattern is comprised of. The body pattern of communication is that we think, feel and do, in that sequence. In communication terms, that translates to ‘thinks, speaks and communicates’. I reckon that before the next century arrives, science will have discovered how to ‘cut out the middleman’, making all communication with another human possible by simply ‘thinking it’. No longer will mankind have the sanctum of their private thoughts.

When I was a growing teenager in the 1950s and I wanted to get a message to a girlfriend, I couldn’t do what teenagers today do. I had to spend time and use much thought and energy to get through to my latest girlfriend. No house in the land, apart from the mansions of the wealthiest and most powerful of people had their own landline, and mobile phones were decades away from being invented. The general public had to use the Public Phone Box; a red cubicle (of the Dr Who image type). This means of public communication would be located on street corners and would either have a queue of people waiting outside in the cold, while some caller inside with a pile of tuppences to hand, was being constantly hurried by those waiting outside to get in the booth to make their call. And that was when the public phone box was working and hadn’t been vandalised.

If I wanted to get a message to my girlfriend at a time when mobiles, landlines and computers didn’t exist for the ordinary boy or girl, I could do three things only.

I could agree upon a pre-arranged time with my girlfriend to be available outside a public phone box near to where she lived and hope that the booth was empty when I rang the booth number for her to pick up. This was an almost impossible operation to achieve unless one prearranged midnight as being the hour when the booth was called. If I wanted to speak with my girlfriend before we next met, the second alternative was to walk to her house with a good excuse prepared, and just hope that her father didn’t open the door and send me packing with a flea in my ear as soon as he saw me stood on his doorstep like a wet rag that wanted wringing. The most common way to communicate with one’s girlfriend in between dates was to go to one’s room and write her a letter, and hope she’d get it the next morning (presuming her parents weren’t the first to get it, read it and burn it). If my girlfriend received my letter, I could either look forward to receiving a reply the next evening (Please note that there were three postal deliveries daily in the 1950s, in the morning, at noon and in the early evening). If I was lucky and on to a good thing, I’d get back her letter splashed with perfume before she posted it. If my luck wasn’t in though and she’d met a better-looking chap since I last saw her and had dumped me, what the postman would deliver back would be the unopened letter I’d sent her, marked ‘Return to sender’.

Many young women who had soldier sweethearts in the ‘Second World War’ years and after, mostly depended on the written letter to communicate their love for each other back and forth. Very occasionally, a pre-arranged call through the Public Telephone Box was possible. Even then, censorship of the lover’s conversation might be listened into by a prurient telephone operator who might have wanted a boring work shift ‘spicing up’. When I went to live in Canada for a few years between 1963 and 1965, it was letters from home that enabled one to feel more or less homesick
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When I was planning to return home from Canada in 1965, I promised a young lady that I’d deliver a message to someone in the Liverpool area. Her previous letters had not been replied to and she was extremely worried.

When I got back to my parent’s house, I wrote to the young man in question. The young man no longer resided at the address he used to, and the upshot was that my letter was returned unopened marked ‘Not here’. Having said that I would deliver the young girl’s message, I felt obliged to do whatever I could to keep my promise.

After many enquiries over the next three months, I eventually learned where the Liverpool contact ‘might be’ as I was aware of his occupation. When I eventually identified the firm he worked at, I caught a train and travelled the fifty miles to Liverpool one afternoon. I eventually spoke with the young man at his place of employment and delivered the message from his Canadian girlfriend. He thanked me for taking the time and effort of delivering the message personally but felt it was no longer relevant.

He and the girlfriend whom I met in Canada, had seemingly been going steady (against their parent’s wishes) for nine months when suddenly, her parents and their two daughters moved to Canada. The couple had been apart for one year when I was asked to deliver the message and there had been no communication between them for the last four months. The love-sick girlfriend wanted to know what had happened and feared he might have had some bad accident.

The young man didn’t go into too much of the circumstances with me (a total stranger) but did tell me that he never passed on his new address when his parents (with whom he still lived) also moved house. The reason was that he’d found a new girlfriend whom he loved to bits and intended to someday marry.

I felt obliged to write back to the girl in Canada and tell her what I’d discovered while acting as ‘go-between’, realising that there was no way her level of disappointment could be lessened by a third party. I never received a reply from her thanking me for my efforts, but who knows the fickleness of ‘love on the hop’; she too may also have got herself a new boyfriend since I’d left Canada? They do say that those Canadian footballers come in a much larger size than their British counterpart.

Delivering that message cost me a day of my time and a good few quid in train fare and expenses, but it illustrates that in the 1950s and 1960s, if you couldn’t communicate by public phone or letter, then the only alternative was to visit in person ‘to deliver the message’. My mother used to tell me, “Billy, if it doesn’t hurt or cost, it’s probably not worth bothering doing”.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 28th January 2020

28/1/2020

I jointly dedicate my song today to two Facebook friends, Caroline D. Caz Astley from Bolton and Liz Divine from Leeds. Both ladies celebrate their birthday today. Have a good day, Caroline and Liz. May your special day be filled with much love, happiness…and…lots of cake and suitable refreshments. Thank you for being my Facebook friend. Bill xx

My song today is ‘Ain’t That A Shame’. This is a song written by Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew. The record was released in 1955 and eventually sold more than a million records. Domino's recording of the song reached Number 1 on the ‘Billboard R&R’ chart and Number 10 on the ‘Billboard Pop Chart’. The song is ranked number 438 on Rolling Stone magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’ list.

The song gained national fame after being re-recorded by Pat Boone. Domino's version soon became more popular, bringing his music to the mass market a half-dozen years after his first recording, ‘The Fat Man’. The song has also been covered by the ‘Four Seasons’ and John Lennon.

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‘Ain’t that a shame’ was one of those expressions that was very common during the ‘Second World War’ years and during my early development. It was eventually supplanted in the 1960s and 1970s with the expression, ‘Poor you’, which essentially meant the same thing. Then, as the years advanced to the 1990s and we approached the New Millennium era, the saying that supplanted ‘Poor you’ to echo the same situation as previous was a more coarsened version, ‘Tough shit’. By 2010, this saying had been replaced by the more observational and self-evident statement of, ‘Shit happens!’

In the above illustration of the generational changes to our language between 1945 and 2020, one can see how far away from the values and norms of our parents and grandparent’s age we have travelled. We have effectively shunned and discarded the values of our past in favour of a more coarsened, selfish and individualised ‘Me, me’ way of life.

Some may say, ‘It’s only words’, as if words don’t matter when they clearly do. Words matter much more than we could ever imagine. Words are the means of communication we use to transport and carry one’s emotions and true intent. In simple behavioural terms, we think, we feel and then we do, in that order. When we think positively, we feel positive and are more likely to act positively. Correspondingly, when we think negatively, we feel negative and are more likely to act in a negative manner. We effectively bring about our own successes and our own failures, and we influence our happy and sad moods by the way we think and the words we speak (especially our self-talk).

Just as our original saying of ‘Ain’t that a shame’ and ‘Poor you’ was specifically directed towards the feelings of the disappointed person, the later sayings of ‘Tough shit’ and ‘Shit happens!’ speaks not ‘to’ the disappointed person’s feelings, but ‘about’ the disappointment observed in the situation. There has been a distinct move away from ‘you’ to ‘me’; a move away from the ‘personal’ to the ‘impersonal’ and more ‘observational’; a move away from the ‘sensitive’ comment to the more ‘selfish’ remark.
As generations experience subtle language changes, each change is often so small at the time as to become discernible, and it is only farther on down the line, we discover that instead of society progressing in a right and proper direction, we’ve blindly used the intervening years pushing each other to hell in a handcart.

If ever you have engaged in the exercise of ‘Chinese Whispers’, you will readily see the huge distinction between the message given at both the start and the end of the process. ‘Chinese Whispers’ requires an audience plus two players at any given time. It starts by the audience presenter giving a brief statement to one of the two players. All the players receiving the message (except player one) are kept out of hearing distance until they come on stage. After the second player comes on stage, they receive the message verbally from the first player. The first player then leaves the stage and a new player comes on stage. The message received by player two is then communicated to player three, and so forth and so forth until a dozen people have received the message.

The initial message passed from player one to player two might be, “ I heard that in any group of five men and four women( all of whom are strangers to each other), that the chances of one of the couples ‘hitting it off’ together is less than 33 per cent, and that the chances of the couple who ‘hit it off’ being of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual or transgender (LBGT) status is 23 per cent.”

As the messages continue to be passed from one player to the next player, memory, misunderstanding, mistake, unconscious personal belief and all manner of human traits come into play; and despite the honest intention of all players to accurately convey the message to the next player due to receive it, subtle changes begin to appear each time the message is passed on. It may only be one word added here, missed there or slightly altered, but by the end of the exercise, the mistakes in each message passed on result in the final message being significantly different to the original message whispered in the ear of player one.

Many see the significant changes over the years as inevitable changes of ‘progression in the making’, but not I. I am not foolish enough to deny the true advancements society has made over the past century. We undoubtedly live longer and with fuller bellies and have access to so many new experiences we could not have dreamed of in the immediate post-war years. We undoubtedly have much more to live for today than we ever did, but too few of us appreciate what we have, along with the things we have lost individually, as a family, a community and a people.

There is undoubtedly a lesser sense of ‘community’ today, as the absence of any personal interaction and the deafening silence on a crowded tube train any day of the busy week will testify. Today, men and women going to high-powered jobs, dressed as fashion mannequins, will nonchalantly walk over and around prostrate bodies laid on the sidewalks without giving a second thought to the needs of the homeless, the vagrant, the refugee, the abused runaway teenager and the addict as they continue to speak on their mobiles and drink their costa coffee on the hoof.

Today, we are able to transverse the globe by plane in less than one day and put a man on the moon on a Wednesday and bring him back to earth before the week is out (240,000 miles), there are so many of our parents living in Care Homes whom we might visit only once monthly, just because we either have better things to do in our busy lives or cannot see the point in visiting a parent with advanced dementia who will never again know us as their child. A man or woman in the 1950s would simply have never thought of farming out the nursing of an aged parent who had lost their memory and mind. In the Irish community where I was born, the community considered the mentally incapacitated as ‘holy innocents’; people to cherish and protect. Such unfortunate people were considered as being people to love and not lock away from the eyes and ears of ‘civilised society’.

I will never forget hearing about the man who was asked why he continued to visit his wife who had Alzheimer’s in her Care Home daily, where he would talk to her as though she could understand him, especially when she could not recognise him as her husband of fifty years. His reply was, “She may have forgotten who I am, but I never will forget who she was”.

The more I think upon these changes in society that have moved from a ‘you’ to a ‘me, me’ response since I was born in 1942, the more I am inclined to think, ‘Ain’t that a shame!’

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 27th January 2020

27/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my dear friend, Barbara Cross, who lives in Alicante, Spain. It isn’t Barbara’s birthday today; I just fancied serenading this beautiful woman who is now enjoying her 80s in the sun. Have a smashing day, Barbara. Bill and Sheila x

My song today is ‘Spanish Harlem’, This song was recorded by Ben E. King in 1960 for ‘Atco Records’. It was written by Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector, and was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

The song was King's first hit away from ‘The Drifters’, a group he had led for several years. With an arrangement by Stan Applebaum featuring Spanish guitar, marimba, drumbeats, soprano saxophone, strings, and a male chorus, it climbed the ‘Billboard’ charts, eventually peaking at Number 15 (R&B) and Number 10 (Pop). It was ranked at Number 358 on Rolling Stone’s list of the ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’. King's version was not a hit in the United Kingdom.

The version which Aretha Franklin released a cover of in 1971 outperformed the original in the charts, in which Franklin changed the lyrics slightly: from "A red rose up in Spanish Harlem" to "There's a rose in Black 'n Spanish Harlem. A rose in Black 'n Spanish Harlem.” Her version went to Number 1 on the ‘US Soul Chart’ for three weeks and Number 2 on the ‘Pop Chart’ for two weeks. Aretha Franklin's version earned a Gold Single for sales of over one million.

This song has been covered by numerous artists like Jay and the Americans: Cliff Richard: Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass: The Mamas and The Papas: Chet Atkins: Long John Baldry: Trini Lopez: Andy Williams: Led Zepplin, and Neil Diamond among many others.

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While I have never been to Spain, or personally had the pleasure of closely knowing a Spanish woman, it has always remained a great country in my mind. Any introduction to the many cultural assets that Spain has produced over the centuries, will include the important thinkers, artists, authors, and champions in most sporting fields.

Never having once been to Spain, the Spain I’ve known has been discovered in books, paintings, wars and the arena of politics and sport. I have long held artistic appreciation of their great artists, Pablo Picasso, Goya and Velaquez, but have never quite been crazy about the works of Salvador Dali. I will never forget being enthralled in the reading of ‘Don Quixote’ or reading Ernest Hemingway’s account of the ‘Spanish Civil War’ in his novel, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’. Show me the golfer who can possibly forget the marvellous wins of Seve Ballesteros on the links, or the tennis fan who can but marvel at the grace and swiftness of Rafael Nadal on the tennis courts of the world.

As a lifelong student of British, European and American History and an avid reader of the history of these great countries, I present you a brief and potted history of this wonderful Mediterranean country.

1492 marks the beginning of Spain’s ‘Golden Age’ when Spain started expanding into the ‘New World’. The Kingdoms of Spain were united under Habsburg rule in 1516, unifying the ‘Crown of Castile’, the ‘Crown of Aragon’ and smaller kingdoms under one rule. During this period, Spain was involved in all major European wars, including the ‘Italian Wars’, the ‘Eighty Year’ War’, the ‘Thirty Year’s War’ and the ‘Franco-Spanish War’.

Until the 1650s, Habsburg Spain was among the most powerful states in the world. Over the following century, its power diminished, and it was not until 1931 when a democratic republic was proclaimed. Six years later, the country descended into the ‘Spanish Civil War’ between the Republican and National factions. The rebel victory in the conflict installed a dictatorship led by Francisco Franco, that lasted until 1975. The first post-war decade was particularly violent, autocratic, and repressive both in a political, cultural, social, and economic sense. The country experienced rapid economic growth during the 1960s and early 1970s. Only with the death of Franco in 1975 did Spain return to the monarchy; this time headed by Juan Carlos, and to democracy.

With a fresh Constitution voted in 1978, Spain entered the ‘European Economic Community’ in 1986 (transformed into the ‘European Union’ with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992), and the ‘Eurozone’ in 1999.

As great explorers in its past, one of the most popular of Spanish quotations is
‘Nunca serás capaz de cruzar el océano hasta que pierdas de vista la costa’. In English, this translates to: “You can never cross the ocean until you possess the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 26th January 2020

26/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my friend, Silvija Klova, from Scarborough and my Facebook friend, Elizabeth Brennan, from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland. Both Silvija and Elizabeth celebrate their birthday today. Have a lovely day, ladies, and leave some room for lots of cake and suitable refreshments.

My song today is ‘Rave On’. This song was written by Sonny West, Bill Tilghman and Norman Petty in 1958. It was first recorded by Sonny West for ‘Atlantic Records’, which released his version in February 1958. Buddy Holly recorded the song later the same year, and his version became a hit; one of six of his recordings that charted in 1958. Holly is instantly recognizable as the artist: the record begins with a drawn-out "Well…" as stylized by Holly's distinctive hiccup ("A-weh-uh-heh-uh-ell…").

Holly's rendition of ‘Rave On’ is ranked Number 154 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2004 list of ‘The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.’

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This record was released during my 15th year of life. Prior to the age of 11 years, I attended ‘St Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ in Heckmondwike, and despite being unable to speak properly until I was 4 years old, I was a very intelligent young boy. My educational progress was advanced for my years; I always came first or second in my class at every subject taught.

Before my 11th birthday, I was encouraged by the Headmaster to take my 11+ examinations to go to the Grammar School, six months earlier than usual. I passed my Grammar School entrance examination but then declined to go. At the time, my working-class credentials combined with coming from a poorer family gave me an ‘inverted sense of snobbery’. I considered all grammar school pupils as toffs who dressed in posh clothes, whereas mine were either well worn or torn.

Having passed my 11+ almost one year earlier than the examination was normally taken, combined with my refusal to go to the grammar school after passing the examination, my Headmaster, Mr. Armitage, gave me the type of punishment that only a Catholic Headmaster could possibly devise. He removed me from a class of my own age and placed me in a class of 14 and 15-year-olds under the guise of ‘pupil promotion’ instead of ‘pupil punishment’. In one spiteful move, the Head had separated me from all my friends and peers and stated, “In future, Forde, you’ll learn in a class with pupils of your ability”.

I’ll give the Headmaster credit; he certainly taught me how to ‘damn with faint praise’. Under the eyes of all his staff and the parents of other pupils, he was able to exact his own particular form of retribution for me ‘having let the school down’ by declining to go to the Grammar School (plus lowering the 1953 equivalent of his school stats).

Within that year, I was to incur a horrific accident when I was knocked down by a wagon that ran over me, twisting my body around the drive shaft. I was received into hospital with multiple life-threatening injuries including damage to my spine, chest collapse (22 of my 24 ribs broken) and extensive damage to both my legs. I was to remain in the hospital for nine months and it would be over two years after my discharge before I was able to stand on my own two feet again and walk.

During this time, I’d missed over thirty months schooling, but one of my teachers (Mr. McNamara) got me tested by Mensa and I came out with a very high score (142). Please note, Mensa scores themselves are more indicative of the way a person thinks and not a level of knowledge/intelligence.

I returned to ‘St Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ briefly to take an examination to attend ‘Dewsbury Technical College’, and I commenced there six months after all my other technical school classmates had started their first term. I was six months away from my 15th birthday and I was still at the hobbling-about stage, having spent the years 11-14 being unable to walk. I thought that I’d be able to catch up to the other class pupils, but having missed so much education (over 2 years) and now having to deal with subjects, we’d never been taught at my previous school, instead of coming first or second in my class at technical school (as I’d grown accustomed to since starting school at the age of five), I found myself in 10th or 11th place.

This ‘normal’ position in class came as a great shock to me, and it was at a stage in my life when I also started to resent being at school because my parents couldn’t afford a change of uniform or pay for any of the additional school equipment required to enable a pupil to fit in and not stand out from their peers.
I’d had enough with school life and more than enough of having ‘to do without’. I wanted to become a worker and earn some money to put some decent clothes on my back and good shoes on my feet. I was unable to play football or rugby with my classmates as I was still having to ungainly hobble around and was unable to run until a few years later when my balance and mobility had significantly improved.

So, on the very same day that the school was having its Christmas party, I gathered up all my textbooks and handed them into the Head’s Office. Officially, I should have stayed on at school a further six months until I was fifteen and a half, but I’d had enough and told the Head to report me to the authorities if he felt like it. The Headmaster had the same surname as me (but without the ‘e’). When Mr. Ford heard what I’d told him, instead of warning me to the contrary or threatening to have my parents fined after informing the ‘Department of Education’, he simply said. “Good luck, Forde. I wish you well. Merry Christmas”.

The following Monday, I started work in a mill in Cleckheaton, as a ‘bobbin collector’ for the princely sum of £2:15 shillings weekly. Over the next six years, I was to remain working in textile mills, where I advanced in position until I decided to emigrate to Canada at the age of 21 years to live for a few years. These six years in the textile mills were some of the happiest years of my life and I wouldn’t exchange one day if I’d to live my life all over again. I met folk in the mill who were unforgettable characters; friends who would give you their last penny, people who deserved to dine at the top of any table in the land instead of serving it for extra part-time income. These were my type of people, folk with whom I was at greatest ease.

My time in Canada, and immediately thereafter when I returned, witnessed me starting to significantly change. Essentially, my estimation of ‘self’ had increased during my Canadian interlude, along with my expectations. I now wanted more out of life and returned to working in a textile company as a ‘working foreman’. I then progressed to taking a job at another mill as an ‘under-manager’, before moving mills again and assuming the position of a ‘Mill Manager’ on nights. I was only 26 years old at the time. In just three years, I’d made a meteoric rise in the textile field, but that wasn’t enough for me.

Upon returning from Canada, I met my first wife-to-be, became engaged and planned to marry her after she’d concluded her teacher training course in Bradford. Without me being consciously aware of it at the time, my value structure, cultural enhancement, and aspiration level were being encouraged to change through my daily association with my fiancée and her family. Whilst being wary of moving outside my social class, (I had always been proud of having come from a working-class background), I was obviously more prepared to go along with my fiancé’s wishes more than I could ever have previously imagined.

I started regularly attending plays, musical productions, theatres, and even ballets, and became familiarised with all manner of classical music. I even started reading a library of ‘classical literature’ instead of the more historical books I’d preferred to read since my teens. I was then encouraged to go back to night school and complete the educational examinations I never took during my 15th and 16th years of life.

Before I married at the age of 26 years, I’d made a momentous decision to change the future course of my life. I took an ordinary worker's job in a Brighouse textile mill which earned me one-third of the wage I’d been previously earning as a night-time Mill Manager. I did this to free me up in my evenings. This would enable me to go to night school three evenings a week and get the ‘0’ and ‘A-level’ qualifications to gain me university entrance.

I now knew what I wanted out of life. I wanted a profession, not a job! I wanted a salary and not a wage! I wanted something vocational instead of occupational and which best-fitted the talents I could offer. I wanted to use my brain instead of my brawn! I wanted to help lawbreakers become law abiders, thieves to turn honest and to show violent and aggressive people how to lose their violent behaviour and make their body aggression work for them instead of against them. I strongly believed I could do this because 'I’d been there' and had 'walked in their shoes'.

At the age of 29 years, I trained to become a Probation Officer at Newcastle (then a Polytechnical College, but now of University status). I’d finally obtained the position in life that best fitted me, and although being a Probation Officer was then a profession filled mostly by middle-class university degree-holders, I was determined that my own life experiences allied to my working-class credentials and values (which I’d temporarily stood down but had never abandoned after returning from Canada), would be the strongest tool in my workbox. How right I was!

I found over the ensuing years, that my having been a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, and having been brought up in a large working-class family on an estate with the values to match, was to be my best assets for a job in which I naturally excelled, in both performance and personal satisfaction. Between becoming a Probation Officer and retiring from that post, I never lost sight of the fact that the clients who sat at the other side of the desk or stood at the opposite side of the prison bars to myself were ‘my people’. Because of this, I found that I was usually trusted by them.

Trust between worker and client is a prerequisite to being able to effectively help them at all; and being able to help people stop committing crimes and to become healthier, happier and more hopeful as a consequence brings any Probation Officer as much satisfaction as is possible.

My claim in helping clients is beyond question if not comparison. Throughout my career, I researched my own work and after completing a ten-year follow-up study with hundreds of clients (each having committed a wide range of grave and numerous offences) the national average figure at the time for ‘non-reconvictions’ two years after the original offence had been committed, was exceeded by myself at a 3:1 ratio. My study group involved over 300 people who had completed my twenty-four two-hour weekly programmes of ‘Relaxation, Assertion Training and Anger Management’. The national figures were taken on a two-year basis; not ten years, as was my study.

During my specialised ‘Behaviour Modification’ work, I discovered many surprising aspects of human behaviour, of which I mention but a few here. I learned that once a worker gains client trust and offers the client a positive programme of work ‘which accords with the client’s philosophy’, it is easier to get men and women who have committed 100 offences to stop offending than to persuade a person with two or three previous offences to stop offending by the more conventional treatment programmes of Probation Officer work! I also learned that with the use of ‘Relaxation Training’, men and women, can more easily break all their drug addictions. I helped over two hundred people who had been taking heavy medication for between 1-10 years (anti-depressants), to break their addictions and not return to their drug intake. I consider this aspect of all my work over a 26-year-old career to have been my greatest achievement as a Probation Officer. I found that where good health needed restoring, that it could never come about without establishing ‘good sleeping practices. In all the major considerations of changing behaviour, I found the most important aspect to a client’s good health and position of self-enhancement was learning how to express loving feelings, become more truthful in thought and deed and learning to forgive self and others. It sounds more like a Bible lesson than a ‘Behaviour Modification’ one, doesn’t it?

I was also very privileged to have learned from my own early years of uncontrollable anger and aggressive behaviour pattern during the early 1970s. I founded the process of ‘Anger Management’, and within a matter of two years, my principles of the Anger Management process had mushroomed across the English speaking world. The numbers of people helped globally through ‘Anger Management’ have been millions not dozens, of which I played a small but significant part by my contribution to the working process of the method.

Throughout my life, I have had significant career changes and life experiences that have satisfied me immensely. I have always adopted a pragmatic and positive viewpoint. I have never held the view that there is only one way to best help all people with similar problem behaviour. I truly believe that anyone who espouses or asserts this view is grossly mistaken.

I have never found any difficulty in ‘moving on’ from one phase of life to another, believing that unless one is forever prepared to change along with the changing circumstances of one’s life and environment, one’s emotions can never progress to full fruition and one’s dreams of being the ‘you’ that you were meant to be becomes ever more distant.

However, I’d have to say that the one constant in my passing years amid all this change, has been my love of singing, the distinctive pleasure of all forms of music, the sheer delight of dancing; and, in particular, being a part of the ‘rock and roll’ and ‘Bopping’. ‘Rave On’.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 25th January 2020

25/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my dear friend, James Power from Kilmeaden, County Waterford in Ireland who celebrates his birthday today. Have a super day, James, and leave room for lots of cake and ale. Make sure ‘The Duchess’ does her wifely duties and spoils you rotten today. If my next operation is successful, Sheila and I plan to spend several weeks touring Ireland this coming spring, so may pop in. Have a nice day. Bill

My song today is ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’. This is an American Negro spiritual and the earliest known recording was in 1909, by the ‘Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University’. In 2002, the ‘Library of Congress’ honoured the song as one of 50 recordings chosen that year to be added to the ‘National Recording Registry’. It was also included in the list of ‘Songs of the Century’ by the ‘Recording Industry Association of America’ and the ‘National Endowment for the Arts’.

‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ was written by Wallis Willis, a Choctaw free-man in the old Indian territory in what is now Choctaw County, near the County seat of Hugo, Oklahoma, sometime around 1865. He may have been inspired by the sight of the ‘Red River’, by which he was toiling, which reminded him of the River Jorden and of the Prophet Elijah being taken to heaven by a chariot (2 Kings 2:11). Some historical sources claim that this song and ‘Steal Away’ (also sung by Willis), had lyrics that referred to the ‘Underground Railroad’, the freedom movement that helped black people escape from Southern slavery to the North and Canada.

Alexander Reid, a minister at the Old Spencer Academy, a Choctaw boarding school, heard Willis singing these two songs and transcribed the words and melodies. He sent the music to the ‘Jubilee Singers of ‘Fisk University’ in Nashville, Tennessee. The Jubilee Singers popularized the songs during a tour of the United States and Europe. Other singers to have recorded the song are many and include Bing Crosby: Kenny Ball: Louis Armstrong: Sam Cooke: Peggy Lee and Paul Robeson.

In 1939, Nazi Germany's ‘Reich Music Examination Office’ added the song to a listing of ‘undesired and harmful’ musical works.

The song enjoyed a resurgence during the 1960s Civil Rights struggle and the folk revival; it was performed by several artists. Perhaps the most famous performance during this period was that of Joan Baez during the legendary 1969 ‘Woodstock Festival’.
Oklahoma State Senator Judy Eason McIntyre from Tulsa proposed a bill nominating ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ as the Oklahoma State official gospel song in 2011. The bill was co-sponsored by the Oklahoma State Black Congressional Caucus. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed the bill into law on May 5, 2011, at a ceremony at the Oklahoma Cowboy Hall of Fame; making the song the official Oklahoma State Gospel Song.

The song became the ‘England Rugby World Cup theme’ for 1991 and It reached Number 16 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’.

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During the 1970s after I first got married, half a dozen newly married couples moved into the same crescent of houses around the same time and we all became close friends. For around six years, before any children appeared on the scene, the group of us would socialise, party, go drinking, dancing, entertain each other in weekly rotation in our homes, and even holiday together.

One of the places we visited for around three years was a public house out in the wilder parts of Oxenhope. Although I only live about a good mile away from Oxenhope today, then, I lived in Mirfield, around twenty-five miles away. We frequented this Oxenhope drinking establishment every week because they always had a night of folk singing that we thoroughly enjoyed. One of the regular singers would always introduce his singing spot with ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, which appeared to be his signature tune and all the pub joined in the singing. This was usually the one song that every patron knew by heart. I never realised at the time just how old this gospel song was.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 24th January 2020

24/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my dear mother who died at the early age of 64 years. Had mum not chain-smoked, and had she given birth to fewer than seven children and the hard life that went with rearing us all, she wouldn’t have been taken too early from this world. Had she lived longer, she would have been enjoying her 98th birthday today, and would no doubt have been downing as many rum and blackcurrant drinks as her children would buy her. The only thing which mum would have found intolerable today would have been just how antisocial in polite company, her chain-smoking habit would have made her.

Other birthdays of friends and Facebook contacts I jointly dedicate my song today to include Lorraine Blair from Perth in Western Australia: Angie Boback from America: Heather Walley from Stoke-on-Trent, and close friend, David Green, from Mirfield in West Yorkshire. I wish you all the happiest of birthdays and hope that you leave room for lots of cake and suitable refreshments. Have a nice day and thank you for being my Facebook friends.

Everybody I know loves their mum to bits, and I’m no exception to that rule. Where I may distinguish myself from many loving children though is that not only did my mother give birth to me and loved me, she was me and I am her. Her influence on me was so pronounced that from an early age, I willingly adopted her positive philosophy to life, along with her general belief that nobody is either better or worse than their neighbour.

The things I can remember most about my mother is her compassion, her charity, her capacity never to hold grudges from one old day to a new one, and her forgiving nature. Her most priceless quality, however, was her boundless love which she would liberally and unashamedly deliver to all and sundry. Not once in my entire life (until I left home), did my mother fail to tell me that she loved me. Her last words to me each day before I went to bed and the very first words she spoke to me on a morning when I got up were ‘I love you, Billy’. Whenever I complained that we were poor or for want of this or that which household finances could not furnish, she would instantly remind me, “Billy Forde, we may have no money to spare, but we are not poor. We have each other!” When she died, there was no material inheritance to bequeath to her children. The inheritance that my mother left me was my six brothers and sisters, along with the most precious of memories that she loved each of us, and told us so daily.

Mum was an intelligent woman, despite having to curtail her education and leave school early to help out at home as the oldest of seven children. Being the firstborn (and female) in a household where her father’s poor heart prevented him doing any manual work, mum (like many an Irish female firstborn) essentially acted the role of ‘little mum’ to all her younger siblings.

My mother was a romantic through and through; in thought, emotion and deed. She not only dreamed constantly, she believed in her dreams; a trait that was undoubtedly passed down to me, her firstborn. Mum never hid her true feelings from my father or any of her family or neighbours. She gave honest expression to her feelings at the moment of their birth, which meant she often acted before thinking. In her own way, mum appeared happily resigned to her natural disposition and was always prepared to renounce any embarrassment in exchange for the possibility of any excitement, and new experience. In short; she loved life and the living of it far to much to ever let it pass her by.

When my father and all my younger siblings were in bed on a night, I would often stay up chatting with mum past midnight as she ironed and darned and got ready for the next morning’s round of motherly chores. This was my most precious time of day that I will always cherish the memory of. We would talk about all manner of things, and not once did my mother refuse to tell me anything I ever asked of her. We shared a relationship that held no embarrassment and could be entirely open with each other. I now realise just how special and rare such a relationship is between a parent and a child, especially between a mother and her firstborn son.

I once recall asking my mother a question about the circumstances of my birth. It was a question that most boys would simply never dream of asking and most mothers would instantly shy away from answering. All my mates on the estate knew the place where they had been born, but I was the only 11-year-old boy I ever knew of whose mum (when directly asked by her son) told him precisely the location ‘where he was conceived’. When I asked mum, she said that it was in a farmer’s field by the ‘Metal Man’ in Tramore, County Waterford. I always revisit this famous tourist site each time I return to Ireland, and which the public cannot get officially close to anymore.

If any dishonesty resided in my mother, it lay in the many Irish tales she would tell me from the old country; tales wrapped in Irish superstition and stretched as far as the truth could be credited. I have not the slightest doubt that my becoming an author of over sixty books was a direct consequence of my mother’s vivid imagination.

After I had written and had published over fifty books for children, young persons and adults, I gave up writing books. Then, after I married my wife, Sheila, she persuaded me to take up the pen again. So, I decided to take the kernel of some of the stories my mother had told me as being Gospel, and after wrapping them in the clothes of Irish myth and a shroud of rustic superstition, I embellished them with a touch Irish artistic licence. I wrote an additional fourteen romantic books between 2011 and 2017. These Irish stories were written and published under the umbrella title, ‘Tales from Portlaw’(the Irish village where I was born in the front room of my maternal grandparent’s house).

All these ‘Tales from Portlaw’ books can be bought from Amazon or any established publisher in either hardback or e-book format, with all profits going to charitable causes in perpetuity (over £200,000 profit given to charity from the sales of my books between 1990-2005). Or, if you would like to read for free, please access my website and the section http://www.fordefables.co.uk/tales-from-portlaw.html

Of all the things my mum would do daily as she completed her housework would be to sing Irish songs. The only English songs she sang were Vera Lynn’s songs. Mum was a wonderful woman, who was also blessed with being beautiful in her prime. And yet, despite her love of singing, mum couldn’t sing for toffee. She couldn’t hold a note any longer than she could refrain from giving a beggar her last shilling. I never heard her sing one verse of a song without forgetting the lines or mixing up the words, and making up her own instead to fill in. Mum sang all day long, every day of her life, and like the late comedian and pianist, Lez Dawson, she always sang all the right notes, but unfortunately, in the wrong order. The only difference between mum and Lez Dawson was that he was a comedian who struck all the wrong piano cords deliberately to get a laugh out of his audience.

After berating my mother for her poor singing one day, mum replied, “Tell me or show me where it is written, Billy Forde, ( she would always add my surname whenever she was angry with me) that only good singers are allowed to sing? And until you can, get out of my way, boyo, because I’ve got lots of work left to do and lots of songs still to sing!”

There was never one day in my life as a child when I did not hear my mother sing, ‘The Isle of Innisfree’. This song was the background music and song to the 1952 film, ‘The Quiet Man’. This American romantic comedy directed by John Ford starred John Wayne as (character Sean Thornton) and Maureen 0’Hara (character Mary Kate Danaher) and Victor McLaglen (who played the part of Mary Kate Danaher’s bullying brother). Never did one Christmas go by without all the Forde Family watching ‘The Quiet Man’. Both mum and dad loved that film, and so it was only natural that all seven of their children grew to love it.

Mum’s favourite song of all was ‘The Isle of Innisfree’, and my father’s favourite film star was John Wayne. Dad admired all the film characters John Wayne played in his films so much that he would daily quote large sections from the films of his hero. Dad’s favourite quotation was ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!” He would quote this particular line to his children whenever expecting us to do that which we didn’t want to do.

For you uninitiated English film buffs who have so far gone through life without ever seen this marvellous film, here is a potted synopsis. In the 1920s, Sean Thornton, an Irish-born American from Pittsburgh, travels to his birthplace, Innisfree, in Ireland, to purchase his family's former farm. Shortly after arriving in Innisfree, he meets and falls in love with the fiery Mary Kate Danaher, the sister of bullying but prosperous landowner, Squire ‘Red’ Will Danaher. Will Danaher also wanted to buy the Thornton family's old cottage and land off the owner, Widow Tillane (whom he hankers to one day marry), and he is angered when the Widow Tillane (a woman not to be taken for granted by any man), accepts Sean's Thornton’s bid instead of Will Danaher’s offer. So when Sean Thornton and Mary Kate Danaher fall in love and ask Mary’s brother, Will, to give them his blessing to marry, he replies, ‘Never!’

When I started my daily singing practise over two years ago, in order to increase the amount of oxygen in my blood and improve my lung capacity, the very first song I sung I dedicated to my mother. It was the song of my childhood that my mother sang every day of her life. I sing that same song today in dedication to a mum whom I dearly loved and have missed every day since her death in 1986. Today, on the 98th anniversary of your birth, Mum, your firstborn sing you ‘The Isle of Innisfree’.

My mother loved this song and she loved the land of her birth, the Emerald Isle, a country where I too was born and shall have part of me buried. Like my mum, going back to Ireland for me is going back home. As soon as I see the Irish shoreline, my heart falls back in love with my country. But it is only when I am travelling that road from County Waterford towards Portlaw and catch sight of the Bridge that is positioned at the bottom of the village of Portlaw where I was born that I feel my spirits rise as my soul rejoices in restorative excitement. This song is for you mum from your firstborn, and for my six brothers and sisters. I love you mum. Billy xxx

As for the ‘Isle of Innisfree’, I recently looked up to see if there was such a place or whether it was a form of mythical Brigadoon. I understand that it is an uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in County Sligo, Ireland, near where Yeats spent his summers as a child. I will certainly check it out when we next tour Ireland.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 23rd January 2020

23/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friend, Kay Walsh from County Tipperary in Ireland. It is Kay’s birthday today. Have a super day, Kay and thank you for being my Facebook friend. Bill

My song today is, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’. This song was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. It was originally released by the ‘Rolling Stones’ as a double A-sided single together with ‘Ruby Tuesday’ in January 1967. The song has been covered by various artists, including David Bowie in 1973.

Released in the United Kingdom as a single on 13 January 1967, ‘Let's Spend the Night Together’ reached Number 3 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ as a double A-Side with ‘Ruby Tuesday’. Both songs entered the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ singles chart on 21 January. However, by 4 March, ‘Ruby Tuesday’ reached Number 1, while ‘Let's Spend the Night Together’ stalled at Number 55. Due to the sexually charged nature of the lyrics, ‘Let's Spend the Night Together’ received less airplay. Other countries also considered ‘Ruby Tuesday’ to be more suitable for radio airplay and so it charted higher than ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’.

On ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ in America, the band was initially refused permission to perform the number. Sullivan himself told Jagger, "Either the song goes, or you go". A compromise was reached to substitute the words "let's spend some time together" in place of "let's spend the night together". Jagger agreed to change the lyrics but ostentatiously rolled his eyes at the TV camera while singing them, as did Bill Wyman. When the Rolling Stones, following their performance of the song, returned on stage, they were all dressed up in Nazi uniforms with swastikas, which caused Sullivan to angrily order them to return to their dressing rooms to change back into their performance clothes, at which point they left the studio altogether. As a result of this incident, Sullivan announced that the ‘Rolling Stones’ would be banned from performing on his show again. However, the ‘Rolling Stones' did appear on the show again and performed three songs on 23 November 1969.

In April 2006, for their first-ever performance in China, authorities prohibited the group from performing the song due to its ‘suggestive lyrics’.

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I was aged 25 years when this song was first released and was engaged to be married the following year. I am not saying that I was ‘an angel’ where it came to observance of all the rules that were then expected of a young man intended to be married, but I did conform to the basic expectation of all British men who were engaged to be married; namely that you did not have full sexual intercourse with your intended bride until your wedding night.

However, I would have to admit to us having spent the night together in an hotel down in the Cotswolds, whenever we went to see one of the Shakespearian plays in Stratford-upon-Avon. We would usually stopover in the Cotswolds before heading for Stratford the next day.

When we first became engaged, we each had our own cultural interest. Mine was reading books and I would often get through two or three books weekly. My fiancée was a ballet lover and a keen patron of Shakespearian plays, which she introduced me to during our courtship. I confess that at school, Shakespeare wasn’t my favourite subject, although I did like the theatre. During our years of engagement and early marriage, we would attend all the Shakespearian plays at the Stratford-upon-Avon Royal Shakespeare Company twice yearly.

When I look back now, I’d have to admit to having been spoilt, as I was introduced to Shakespeare by watching some of the country’s finest actors and actresses at the start of their long and distinguished careers. I will never forget seeing a young Judy Dench strut the stage as though she owned it, and so many more great thespians, several of whom would help me twenty years later in my charitable work, including the great Dame Judy Dench.

Back to our stop-over at the Cotswold Hotel. My main recollection of the first time we stayed in an hotel together was how it came about. My fiancée asked me to book the room as she did not want her widowed mother to know any more than was necessary, and being a young man in my mid-twenties, I was naturally pleased when the only available room for that weekend turned out to be a double . I was still living at my parent’s house at the time and when the letter confirming our overnight hotel booking arrived (I cannot now recall how it came about), my father opened the letter and glanced at its contents. I was half expecting his stern Roman Catholic words of disapproval, but I surprisingly forgot that he was a man ‘as well as’ being a Roman Catholic.

Dad simply looked at me and said, “If you can get away with it, lad, what’s it got to do with me?” Given his strictness in almost all things under the sun, his response really took me off guard. Even being the age of 25 years during the 1960s, didn't allow one full adult liberty. When one still lived at the parental abode, parental rules and expectations were crossed at one's peril.

I cannot begin to even imagine how he would have responded had it been a ‘dirty weekend’ of one of my sister's letters he’d stumbled across? Anyway, it was this period in my life that today’s song reminds me of.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 22nd January 2020

22/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friend, Yvonne Burgess who lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Yvonne celebrates her birthday today. Thank you for being my Facebook friend Yvonne and have a nice day. Bill x

Today’s song is ’What Becomes of The Broken Hearted’. This was a hit single recorded by Jimmy Ruffin and was released on the ‘Motown Records’ Soul label in the summer of 1966. It is a ballad, with lead singer Jimmy Ruffin recalling the pain that befalls the brokenhearted, who had love that's now departed. The song essentially deals with the struggle to overcome sadness while seeking a new relationship after a breakup.

The tune was written by William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser and James Dean. ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’ remains one of the most revived of Motown's hits. ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’ peaked at Number 7 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’, and at Number 6 on the ‘Billboard R&B Singles’ chart; as well as Number 8 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’. Eight years later, the song was reissued and surpassed its original chart position, reaching Number 4, and thus making it his highest-placed chart single in the UK.

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Look across any road or down any street; go inside any home in any place at any time, and there you will find the ‘broken-hearted’. Not all of us are broken-hearted, and thankfully, nor are most of us, but each of us will know of someone who is. It is the most debilitating, depressing and destructive of human conditions that can befall any person. It essentially stops the person living any meaningful or pleasurable life and places them into a world of suspended animation where continuous hurt and unsettled emotions reign supreme.

For over one twenty-six years I was a Probation Officer who also trained and worked in the additional roles of Marriage Guidance Counsellor: Anger Management Worker: Relaxation Trainer and Bereavement Counsellor over a twenty-six-year career in West Yorkshire. By the time I retired, I had seen too much hurt and heartbreak and had worked with enough depressive, desperate and dispirited souls to last a lifetime.

Over my career, I have worked with people who have killed and thereby created heartache for others, as well as working with parents who’d had a child or another family member murdered. I’ve worked with families who’d lost a loved one through some tragic accident, and I’ve comforted and cried with a mother, who after several years and a number of miscarriages, gave birth to a baby who lived three hours before dying in her arms. I have sat with parents whose house had been burgled, and among the things stolen was the personal effects they had of their deceased and only child. The robber had stolen the items and then decided to burn the photographs to destroy the evidence of his theft. I have worked with young people who have been burnt out of their homes along with arsonists who burn for sheer excitement, whatever the risk to human and animal life. I once worked with a man who contracted HIV and who knowingly went on to deliberately infect others. This was at the start on that particular medical plague. I have worked with men and women whose inhuman torture and killing of domestic pets have witnessed them receiving no more than a fine at Court. I have worked with people who had their childhoods stolen and their adulthood left forever unhappy through the sexual molestation, rape, incest and physical hurt inflicted on them by fathers and brothers and uncles who were m t to love and protect them. I have visited people in prison, who allegedly committed crimes for which they were convicted of and never confessed to ( crimes I believe they never did), and I have known people who have committed terrible crimes for which they were never caught, convicted or imprisoned.

The author, Stephen King once said, “Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.” I know of many people who would share his expressed sentiments even though I could not.

Hearts can be strong; they can be trusting and faithful, and hearts can burn with a passion that ignites the soul, yet sharp are their pieces if ever broken and deep is the pain when pierced through. Hearts are also the most fragile of human organs. Their condition is directly responsible for millions of premature deaths when we fail to listen to them. When broken by the loss of a loved one or the emotionally cruel actions of someone once loved (or even still loved), the heart can be a cold survivor of suffering for the once romantic, but now ice maiden. A broken heart can rip a human apart just as much as the broken wings of a butterfly kills a part of nature that can never be reborn.

Was I to try and identify, from the many examples of a broken heart I’ve seen in others, I would be unable to conclusively concur that it is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all! I know from my work with ‘broken-hearted clients’, that those hearts which took the longest to heal (from those hearts that did heal), belonged to all manner of people. They belonged to those people who had ‘loved and lost’ as well as those who never found the love they sought. I worked with so many good people who gave their heart (and body also), to another, only to have it broken through the unfaithfulness, dishonesty, rejection, desertion or ultimate betrayal of the other person in whom they’d placed their total trust.

There have been many men and women who essentially told me in their own words that they’d given their heart to another, only to have it returned to them in pieces. It may seem hard to believe that one person can love another so much, that if circumstances suddenly and inexplicably change and the other person deserts them, dumps them for another, stops loving them or perhaps says that they never did love them, all the ‘lost-out-lover’ can feel is an constant wanting to die.

Look on Facebook any day of the week and you can read the texts of the broken hearted in their hundreds. Their mouths may say “I’m okay”, their fingers may text, “I’m fine”, and their smiling photograph may suggest they are getting on with their lives, but behind their smile lies a broken heart that never mended, and behind that laugh of bravado, they are falling apart. Within their body ls a frightened soul fighting to get out and truthfully engage with life once more, but a lack of confidence in self and trust in others militates against them being prepared to invest their love again.

I don’t know if a heart was ever meant to be broken, or if indeed, it ever truly is. There is a divide between the fractured and the broken in which the degree of hurt cannot be measured; and just like an injured limb, a fracture can often prove more painful and complicated, and take much longer to heal than a clean break does!

A broken heart emotionally bleeds whenever the touch of another threatens to massage it and bring it back to life’. The thing never to forget, however, is this. If your heart beats, it is capable of loving, and if it continues to throb, life lives within it. The only long-term answer when you have been badly let down by another is to liberate the love of your heart and let it out once more. The more love you express, the more love will surely return. Allow your love to fly and land upon other hearts, and like a budding butterfly reborn inside the body of a caterpillar, you will fly to new experiences and know other worlds.

I once read that unless hearts were breakable, they would have no purpose. Perhaps hearts will never be made practical until they are made unbreakable? I would, however, like to believe that it is the heart’s capacity to give all when it is at its most vulnerable which designates it as the most important organ in our body, signifying its desire for life to go on.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 21st January 2020

21/1/2020

My song today is ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. This song was recorded by the Beatles and is credited to Lennon- McCartney. It was written by John Lennon with some collaboration from Paul McCartney. It was released on the film soundtrack of the same name in 1964, before being released as a single.

The song topped the charts in both the United Kingdom and the United States when it was released as a single. The American and British singles of ‘A Hard Day's Night’, as well as both the American and British albums of the same title, all held the top position in their respective charts for a couple of weeks in August 1964, the first time any artist had accomplished this feat

The song was the fifth of seven songs by the Beatles to hit Number 1 in a one-year period; an all-time record on the US charts.

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I was living in Canada when this song by the Beatles was first recorded and released. The title of the song brings my thoughts back to a time in my life, when as an 11-year-old boy, I lay awake in a hospital bed night after night in the old Batley Hospital in the dead of night, as nearly all the other patients in the ward slept soundly. Apart from an occasional whimper from another patient experiencing some discomfort farther down the ward, or the shuffling of bedsheets being rearranged as a dead patient was being removed to the hospital morgue before dawn, or a resounding fart being let off by a sound sleeper who’d never learn of his 3:00 am smelly indiscretion, the hospital ward was as quiet as a slumbering church mouse.

I‘d been run over by a large wagon and had incurred life-threatening injuries. Having been wrapped around the main drive shaft of the vehicle that had knocked me down and trapped my body beneath, when I was eventually released and taken to hospital for treatment, I was at death’s door. With a damaged spine, a punctured lung, and every rib (except two) broken in my chest, along with numerous breaks in my arms and legs, my situation remained critical for the first month of my nine-month hospital stay as an inpatient. My parents were informed a number of times during the first fortnight that I wouldn’t make it through the night, and then when my life seemed to be out of danger, they were then told that my spinal and legs injuries meant that I’d never walk again (a situation that prevailed for almost three years before my spine started sending messages to my brain once more).

After coming off the critical list, I found that I could not sleep at night when all the other patients slept. There is nothing lonelier than spending the dark hours wide awake with your own thoughts and nobody awake around you with whom to speak with and to share what you are thinking/fearing.

This nightly experience of not sleeping a wink in a hospital while the rest of the ward slept soundly was to return to me in my 74th year. Just after my 70th birthday, I was diagnosed with terminal blood cancer and for the first three years, I underwent nine months of chemotherapy along with fortnightly blood transfusions weekly, graduating to every two weeks.

Over the following years, I would develop three different cancers in my body (terminal blood cancer, skin cancers, and rectal cancer), along with a Lymphoma in 1916 which nearly killed me twice during the three months I was a hospital inpatient. I also started another six-month course of chemotherapy sessions but was obliged to stop them halfway through. At the time my body was apparently so weak that they feared I’d die and without my knowledge, or that of my wife, I had a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ placed on me (something, which in certain circumstances, is apparently legally allowed), as I later discovered.

While I never once personally imagined that I was at death’s door, I was in a great deal of pain that kept me awake all night, every night, for almost a month. Although I was in a side ward, the very same experiences I’d had as an 11-year-old boy in Batley Hospital returned to this old man in the wee hours of the early morning in Airedale Hospital in Keighley as a deathly silence crept through the ward.

The only words which came close to describing these two hospital experiences when I couldn’t sleep were having, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song for the Day: 20th January 2020

20/1/2020

Today, I became aware that I missed mentioning the birthday of a good Facebook friend of mine on September 20th, 2019. Her name is Susan M. Boon from Mississauga in Ontario.

I am not sure why this oversight occurred, (but I do frequently learn after the event) that the birthday of a Facebook friend has passed and that Facebook didn't flag it up.

I apologise if I have missed out on anyone else's birthday. Might I ask if you would like to be included on my list of dedicated songs on your birthday, please ensure that you provide me with your birth date in advance of it, and not rely on Facebook flagging it up for me.

I dedicate to Susan M.Boon and anyone else whose birthday I forgot to mention on my daily page at the time, this song of mine in belated celebration and apology.
Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 20th January 2020

20/1/2020

I have two Facebook contacts who celebrate their birthday today. They are Pauline Voci who hailed from Halifax but now lives in Mississauga in Ontario and Susan Abbott who hails from Cleckheaton and now lives in Bridlington. Have a lovely birthday and thank you for being my Facebook friends. I hope you don’t mind my posthumous dedication to my dear friend, the late John Charles; it wasn’t his birthday today but it was his recorded song that I sing.

I dedicate my song today posthumously to my dear old friend, the late William John Charles C.B.E. (27/12/31 to 21/02/04) who played football for Leeds United and later in his career for Juventus in Italy. When John died in February 2004, he was rated by many as having been the greatest all-round footballer ever to come from Britain. He was equally adept as either a forward or defender due to his strength, pace, technique, vision and having the eye for a goal.

He is included in the ‘Football League 100 Legends’ and was inducted into the ‘Football Hall of Fame’. One of the most significant aspects that led to him being colloquially called ‘The Gentle Giant’ ( Il Gigante Buono – ‘The Gentle Giant’) was that during his 25-year playing career, he was never cautioned or sent off, due to his philosophy of never kicking or intentionally hurting opposing players. Every inch of his 6 ft 2 inches stature represented football as it should be played. John came from a very talented Welsh family and his brother, Mel Charles and nephew, Jeremy Charles, also represented Wales, as did John. His grandson, Jake represented Wales at youth level and plays professionally today.

My song today is ’16 Tons’. This song was written by Merle Travis about a coal miner, based on life in the mines in Kentucky. The song was first released in July 1947 and became a gold record. A 1955 version recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached Number 1 in the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ charts, while another version by Frankie Laine was introduced in Europe in 1956 in competition to Ford’s version.

In 1957, John Charles was transferred to Juventus in Italy, for the world record transfer fee of GBP 65 000. With Juventus, John Charles won three Italian league championships and was voted ‘Footballer of The Year’ in 1958. The same year as John Charles was voted ‘Footballer of the Year’, he had another world record. He became the first-ever footballer to release a record that would reach the Number 1 spot on the Italian hit list. Then in 1997, he was invited to record ‘16 Tons’(https://bit.ly/2QMBunI ).

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Following his retirement from football, John Charles became the landlord of the New Inn public house on Elland Road, Churwell, Leeds; a public house which later was also managed by another Leeds United player and Wales international, Byron Stevenson.
In January 2004 he suffered a heart attack shortly before an interview for Italian television and required the partial amputation of one foot for circulation reasons before he returned to Britain. He died in Pinderfields Hospital, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, on the 21st of February, 2004. His widow, Glenda, bequeathed his ashes to the City of Swansea.

Between 1990 and 2004, I wrote dozens of books for children and young persons and raised £200,000 profit from their sales, which was given to charitable causes. On the coat tail of the masses of publicity I received from the Yorkshire press and media of television and radio, I began inviting famous names and celebrities into Yorkshire schools to read from my books. I started with local celebrities in 1990 and then quickly progressed to national celebrities in 1991. By 1994, I was receiving praise and support from many national famous names and international figures from church, state, screen, sport, space, stage, film, politics, and even royalty agreed to read my books publicly in special school assemblies, libraries, and disabled centres.

By the New Millennium over 860 national and international famous names had read from my books in Yorkshire schools and even the late Princess Diana and Nelson Mandela had praised my work, along with the Chief Inspector of British Schools for Ofsted who had told the Guardian that my writing was ‘high-quality literature’ after reading from one of my books in a West Yorkshire Primary School.

After having received such high endorsement of what I was doing and writing about, it became easier for me to attract the highest and the best in the land from royalty to film stars like Princess Anne, the Earl and Countess of Harewood and film stars like the great Norman Wisdom. Timothy West, Christopher Timothy, Dora Bryan, Rosemary Leach, etc etc.

It often took a long time between sending out the initial invite to read, a celebrity reader’s acceptance and the eventual arrangements for the venue and date to be agreed upon, that it was not unusual to take up to a full year from start to finish of the process. Occasionally, due to unavoidable change of circumstances, a planned venue would need to be re-arranged at short notice.

In late 1992, I wrote to the English dancer, singer, entertainer and television presenter, Roy Castle, and invited him to visit a Yorkshire school as the celebrity reader of one of my children’s books called ‘Maw’, and he readily agreed. Roy said that we would work out arrangements in due course. In March 1992, Roy was diagnosed with lung cancer and was told it would likely prove terminal, and because of operations and time in hospital between then and his death in September 1994, it was necessary to take a rain check.

On the day of my book publication of ‘Maw’, the great footballer John Charles agreed to stand in for Roy Castle and he read to school children in ‘R.M. Grills Middle School’, off Windybank Estate in Hightown, Liversedge. This gentle giant reading a book on the theme of ‘bullying’ was an ideal substitute celebrity for Roy. After that reading, which proved a huge success, John read for me in a disabled centre in Dewsbury and helped me with several charitable fixtures I had organised. We became good friends over the next seven years before he died and I visited him in his home at Birstall on many occasions and also had a few pints with him in the pub he managed, the ‘New Inn’ on the way to Leeds.

I choose as my song to sing today John, the song you recorded. I don’t know if they sing up in heaven, John, but if they do, I know which number you’ll be belting out.
Love and peace Bill xx

Song For Today: 19th January 2020

19/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friend, Deborah Ives of Leeds. Although I’ve not yet met Deborah in person, from the little I know of her, and from her own Facebook comments on her page, she most certainly possesses both characteristics of today’s song. Not only is she a beautiful woman but is also (on her own admission) a crazy woman. So, put these two characteristics together and that is what makes her the perfect person to whom I dedicate my song today. Have a nice day, Deborah, and Sheila and I will meet up one day as I regularly visit one of the hospitals in Leeds. Bill x

Today’s song is ‘Beautiful Crazy’. This is a song that was recorded by the American country & western singer, Luke Combs. Luke wrote the song with Wyatt Durrette and Robert Williford. It was a bonus track to his 2017 debut album ‘This One’s for You’. The song had gained viral attention prior to its release as a single.

On the ‘Hot Country Songs Chart’ dated May 19th, 2018, ‘Beautiful Crazy’ debuted at Number 6; Combs's highest debut on that chart. The song had not been released as a single at the time but achieved this position through downloads and streaming. The song reached the top 10 at Country Airplay and it reached Number 1 on the ‘Country Airplay Chart’ on March 2nd, 2019, making Combs the first artist to send their first five singles to the Number 1 spot since the inception of ‘Nielson Sound Scan’ in January 1990. It also reached Number 1 on the ‘Hot Country Songs Chart’, becoming his second Number 1 on that chart. It also reached Number 1 on ‘Country Streaming Songs and Country Digital Song Sales’. The song's seven-week reign atop ‘Country Airplay’ was the longest since the chart's inception in 2012 and the longest for a song based strictly off airplay since 2004. It also stayed on the ‘Hot Country Songs Chart’ for 11 weeks.

The song was certified Gold by the RIAA on August 22nd, 2018, Platinum on January 28th, 2019, and double Platinum on March 18th, 2019.

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This song reminds me of a young woman in her early twenties whose name I cannot recall, and whom I never met. She lived in Toronto and was the girlfriend of a mate. The young woman had been dating a friend of mine with whom I would occasionally attend ice hockey matches and football venues. While the young woman wasn’t said to be particularly stunning in the ‘looks department’, there was an unmistakeable wildness, unpredictability, and beauty about her; the things she did, how she did them, and in what circumstances.

My friend told me once that they’d be out at a restaurant and when it came to giving the waiter a tip at the end of the evening, he tipped the standard 10 percent of the bill on the plate, As soon as his lady friend saw the amount given by her boyfriend, the young woman seized his wallet and replaced the $5 tip with a $10 tip. My friend would say that though he loved being with his girlfriend, he added that sometimes he felt embarrassed.

He told me that his girlfriend wasn’t the type of woman that could be described as being extravagant or high maintenance. He said she wasn't the type who only wanted the finest and the best out of life. He said that she would be prepared to do things that didn’t cost them a cent and she was reportedly the kindest and least selfish woman he’d ever known. "She frightens me when I don't know what she will do next, Bill" he once told me.

When they were watching the American Football at a game and their side made a superb run and all the crowd yelled, jumped and cheered, so would she. However, her excitement would tend to boil over. A simple up and down jump would never be enough for her. She would apparently become so excited and animated that she would seize the cap of the man at the side of her and swap it with her girly pompom headgear, or grab the stranger’s huge carton of popcorn out of his hand and throw it up in the air like confetti at a wedding. She would then smile at the astonished spectator next to her and instead of complaining, his heart would melt, and his objection would be instantly stifled as he also threw his popcorn alongside her.

My friend once told me that he loved being with his girlfriend but added, “In many ways, Bill, it’s never knowing what she’ll do next. She’s crazy and nuts but I love her beautiful and strange ways”.

I never once met his girlfriend and would occasionally wonder when he talked about her if she really existed. He said she was a nurse who worked long shifts. I was never quite sure whether he was frightened that I wouldn’t approve of her crazy behavioral outbursts if we ever met, or perhaps he recognised her as being too ‘beautifully crazy’ to risk introducing her to an Irish romantic like me who’d always been instantly attracted to bizarre beauties?

I once read somewhere that one could never be old and wise unless they’d first been young and crazy. I can honestly say that I never once thought about my friend or his ‘beautiful crazy’ girlfriend again since returning from Canada in 1964 to sometime towards the end of December 2019, when I first heard today’s song on the Country & Western Annual Awards from America; a time span of 55 years. I wonder if they ever married.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 18th January 2020

18/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friend, Mary Forsey, who hails from my place of birth. Have a nice day, Mary.

Today’s song is ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. This song is a cowboy Country & Western song that was written in 1948 by American songwriter, film and television actor Stan Jones. This song would become a cowboy legend and was even covered as late as 2018, when ‘Devil Driver’ covered Johnny Cash's version of this song on their 2018 “Outlaws 'Til the End: Vol. 1” album. Since first being recorded in 1948, approaching eighty artists have covered the song in recordings of their own. Indeed, members of the western writers of America chose it as ‘The Greatest Western Song of All Time’.

The song tells a folk tale of a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the spirits of damned cowboys. One warns him that if he does not change his ways, he will be doomed to join them, forever "trying to catch the Devil’s herd across these endless skies". The story has been linked with old European myths of the ‘Wild Hunt’, in which a supernatural group of hunters passes the narrator in wild pursuit.

Stan Jones stated he had been told the story when he was 12 years old by an old Native American who resided north-east of the Douglas, Arizona border town, a few miles behind D Hill, north of Agua Prieta in Sonora. The Native Americans, possibly Apache, who lived within Cochise County, believed that when souls vacate their physical bodies, they reside as spirits in the sky, resembling ghost riders. He related this story to Wayne Hester, a boyhood friend (later owner of the ‘Douglas Cable Company’). As both boys were looking at the clouds, Stan shared what the old Native American had told him, looking in amazement as the cloudy shapes were identified as the ‘ghost riders’ that years later, would be transposed into lyrics. The melody is based on the song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home’.

There are far too many artists who have covered and recorded this song to name, but a few notables would include Stan Jones who recorded the original version in late 1948 or early 1949. Other notables who recorded the song include Vaughn Monroe: Bing Crosby: Frankie Laine: Marty Robbins: Johnny Cash: Peggy Lee: Gene Autry: Burl Ives: Frank Ifield: Tom Jones and even Elvis Presley in 1970, while Duane Eddy brought his electrified ‘twangy guitar’ sound along with a sax edition by Jim Horn to a 1996 version of ‘Ghost Rider’.

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Sometime during the 1950s, I first heard this song being sung by my maternal uncle, Johnnie Fanning. Johnnie was the third eldest child in my mother’s family. My mother and father migrated to West Yorkshire from Ireland in the mid-1940s with the first three children of their marriage. I was the oldest child of my parents (there would eventually be seven children born), and like her family before ours, my mother was also the oldest of seven children born to her parents.

As the oldest child in her family, now settled in England with their own council property, my mother put up each of her three brothers as they too migrated to England, three years apart from each other. Willie was the first of my mother’s siblings who we accommodated, Johnnie was the second and Tom was the third to be put up in our house until they got settled in work and an eventual place of their own. Each uncle (now all sadly deceased) brought their own choice of song with them. Uncle Willie sung any Irish song when he lived with us and Uncle Tom’s favourite was ‘When I Fall in Love’. But Uncle Johnnie’s two favourite songs which he never failed to sing any single day of the three years he lived with us was ‘Down Mexico Way’ and ‘Ghost Riders in The Sky’.

So, the first man I heard sing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ was my Uncle Johnnie and the next man I heard sing it on the radio was Johnny Cash.

I don’t know if they allow you to sing songs either ‘down there’ or ‘up there’ Uncle Johnnie, but if they do, I know that it will most certainly be one of these two songs that you are singing. God bless you. Your nephew Billy (or as you always referred to me outside your company, ‘Billy Forde, Maureen’s oldest’).

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 17th January 2020

17/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friends, Eddie Walsh from Ireland and Warren Harvey Ackroyd from West Yorkshire. Both Eddie and Warren celebrate their birthdays today. I hope that your day is memorable and happy and that you each leave room for lots of cake and ale. Best regards Bill.

Today’s song is ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. This song was written by American singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson and songwriter Fred Foster. The song was originally performed by Roger Miller. A posthumously released version by Janis Joplin topped the ‘U.S. Singles Chart in 1971, making the song the second posthumously released Number 1 single in U.S. chart history after ‘Sitting on the Dock Of the Bay’ by Otis Redding. Other recordings of the song include those by Loretta Lynn and Kris Kristofferson himself, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton Olivia Newton-John, Gordon Lightfoot and Johnny Cash among many others. In 2004, Janis Joplin’s version of this song was ranked Number 148 on Rolling Stone’s list of the ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’.

The song tells the story of two drifters, the narrator and Bobby McGee. The couple Hitch a ride from a truck driver and sing as they drive through the American south. Partway, the song's narrator expresses sadness. Due to the singer's name never being mentioned and the name ‘Bobby’ being easily identifiable to both sexes, the song has been recorded by both male and female singers with only minor changes needed to the lyrical content.

Roger Miller was the first artist to record the song and it appeared at Number 12 on the ‘U.S. Country Chart’ in 1969. Gordon Lightfoot’s version hit Number 13 on the pop music chart and made Number 1 on the country music chart in his native country of Canada in 1970.

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This song was first released in 1970 in the States, but it would be a few years later before it came across the music ocean to hit the radio airwaves in England. I was just commencing my career as a Probation Officer at the time. I was a man in my early 30s who was determined to change the world for the better and to right the numerous wrongs in society that then surrounded us.

As a man with his own speckled past where stealing was concerned, this Probation Officer-turned-Gamekeeper was resolved to make up for the many chances he’d received from significant others along the way. There had been many times I’d hitch-hiked my way through life as a teenager when others had stopped to help me along the road.

I could recall going to the dance in Halifax, spending all my money and having to hitch a ride home from a sympathetic motorist around midnight as I walked the ten miles back. I remember having stolen from the greengrocer shop on the estate where we lived. Not only did the grocer, Mr. Northrop, decline to tell my parents of my theft or report me to the police; instead, he offered me a Saturday morning job in his shop and allowed me to serve the customers and use the cash till. Mr. Northrop was probably the one person in my life who was ‘more responsible’ for me becoming a Probation Officer than any other person in my life.

There have been so many people as I’ve ‘hitchhiked ‘through life who stopped and helped me continue my crime-free journey along the way by giving me good advice and offering me support, encouragement, and love; or who have steadied me and held me up straight when I threatened to fall again. It is all these good people whom I think of when I hear this song.

You must also have known such people in your life who helped you significantly along the way. I once co-composed a song about how we each pass through life and often fail to smell the roses along the way. The song was composed for my late friend and the nation’s favourite television gardener, Geoffrey Smith, entitled ‘ We Must Smell the Roses As We pass By.’ Upon Geoffrey’s wish, after his death, I re-wrote his song and turned it into a hymn, ‘Be My Life’, which I then gave to my wife, Sheila as her Easter Sunday present of 2011. http://www.fordefables.co.uk/be-my-life.html

I could so easily have changed the message from ‘failing to smell the roses as we pass by’ to one of ‘being unaware of the people who significantly touch and influence us along our journey of life’. Have a nice day everyone, especially, Eddie and Warren.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 16th January 2020

16/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friend, Amanda Katina Bright from Manchester. Thank you for being my friend, Amanda and enjoy your day. Bill x

Today’s song is ‘Forever Tonight’ that was recorded in the fifth solo album ‘One Clear Voice’ by Peter Cetera in 1995. Following his departure from Warner Brothers in 1993, Cetera met Steve Devick while on vacation in Maui with his daughter. Devick had created the Chicago-based label in 1985 and was looking to expand from its Gospel roots into popular music. Cetera, who was looking for a new label at the time, signed a multi-album deal in October 1993.

Teaming up again with Andy Hill, who had produced his previous album, ‘World Falling Down’, Cetera took a more active role songwriting, this time, writing six new songs for the album. The song "(I Wanna Take) Forever Tonight" had been given to Cetera by its composer Eric Carmen who had himself recorded it some five years previously for an abandoned album: (Eric Carmen quote:)"Peter...toned down the lyric and made it a little less sexual.”

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It is the most natural thing in the world to want something that feels so good to last forever. Drink a glass of vintage wine of the highest quality or eat the most delicious food from your plate and notice how we make the delicious taste linger in our mouth as long as possible. It is no different from anything we find extremely enjoyable or satisfying in our life, and sexual pleasure and satisfaction are of no less consideration to our life. The better and more exciting and exhilarating it is, the longer we want it to last! I will readily acknowledge that there have been one or two nights of sheer bliss when I regretted the morning sun rising; nights I wish had gone on forever, or indeed nights with one or two women I have known, that did seem to go on forever.

I remember as a child, saving the best food on my plate to last, as I forked the peas and sampled the other vegetables before cutting into the juicy steak or succulent pork chop that I relished devouring. There have been books that I enjoyed reading so much that I deliberately delayed reading the end, to prolong the pleasure when it does come. As an author myself, there have been stories I have read up until the point, I thought ‘this would have been the most appropriate place to end, leaving one not knowing the outcome’. So, I read no further, in the belief that I’d read far enough. I have spoken with so many artist friends and all tell me that knowing when one is done with the painting is such a subjectively personal thing. After all, none of us ever knows how it will end until the moment arrives when it does!

Very little can be said about this song apart from its sexual overtones. I came across it by chance when I was searching for a song to sing in my daily singing practice sessions I’ve been doing over the past two years. The primary purpose of my daily singing practice is to increase the oxygenation in my blood.

Having exhausted my own repertoire of songs with which I am acquainted, I now need to find and learn new songs to daily practise and record on my Facebook page. I found the composition of this song, with its steep rises in a note and varied tone and pace exceedingly challenging, but good practise.
I often sing songs that stretch my vocal range, and which are clearly outside my comfort zone. These types of songs are the hardest and best songs for me to practise as they oxygenate my lungs the most.

I thoroughly enjoy my daily fix of singing now these days but assure all my listeners that I sing not out of false pretence that I can sing at all. No! I sing for joy and for health enhancement. I now sing because I am glad to be alive each morning that I wake up. This is my 'Song of Life'.

I can truly testify, however, that within a space of six months after commencing my two-hours per day singing practice, the oxygenation levels had increased almost twenty percent. Today my lung capacity is far nearer the normal range than it was before I started my daily singing practise two years ago and I would recommend anyone who wants to improve their lungs significantly without donning shorts and running half a marathon to commence singing practise. If your experience of singing mirrors mine, I promise that you will find it fun, pleasurable and highly satisfactory. If you need others around you, then why not consider joining a local choir or musical drama group.

I often wonder what my mum would think today if she knew that I did a few hours daily singing practise? She’d probably exercise her inalienable right to join in, as she loved singing, every day, all day long.

As the firstborn of my parent’s seven children, there was never one day I can remember when my mother wasn’t singing a song as she cleared a mountain of housework. My mother loved singing even though she couldn’t hold a note longer than a boiling pan or string a bunch of notes together in any manner of musical resemblance. She was, in fact, a bit like the late comedian Lez Dawson who would play his piano out of key, only mum didn’t sing wrongly deliberately. Mum would always sing all the right notes but unfortunately, in the wrong order! And, never once did mum sing the proper words to whichever song she was singing. The words she didn’t know or had forgotten, she just made up and inserted her own. I never knew if to laugh or cry. When I heard her sing as a child, I laughed, but whenever I hear a song today that mum used to sing, I cry.

When I was about 7 years old, I once rebuked mum for her singing and told her rudely that she couldn’t sing for toffee. Mum simply looked puzzled and asked that I show her the book or where it was written down that God decreed only those people who could sing like a bird and hold a note were allowed to sing at all? Naturally, I couldn’t find any reasoning to support my argument to ban mum singing. Mum then said, “Well then, Billy Forde, get out of my way because I’ve got loads more work that needs doing, and many more songs to sing!”. If ever there was a person to both put me in my place and keep me there it was my mother.

Her message about one's 'Song of Life’, taught me in my adult years that we each have a song to sing and that our 'Song of Life’ will spring from our daily endeavours and the natural talents we display. When we do not demonstrate our 'Song of Life’ through our vocal cords, we may reveal ‘our song’ through other things, like our listening abilities our instinctive and boundless compassion, our wisdom to understand and our strength to forgive. Some may paint, some sculpt, some write, some excel at sport and some may be the closest comrades a man might have. The 'Song of Life' for some people can be found in their willingness to honestly toil for a fair day’s wage. Some hew coal from the face of the underground like my mining father did, some are the best cooks, the finest of friends and the most loving of mothers. Not forgetting all those who help the stranger in want, and give that which the stranger needs.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 15th January 2020

15/1/2020

I jointly dedicate my song today to my nephew David Forde who celebrates his birthday today. Have a good day, David and leave some room for some cake. Love and best regards. Uncle Billy and Sheila xx

I also jointly dedicate my song today my Facebook friend, Chuck Braxton from Nashville, Indiana who also celebrates his birthday today. Have a nice day, Chuck and leave room for lots of cake and a birthday drink. Thank you for being my Facebook friend. Bill.

Today’s song is ‘Handbags and Glad Rags’. This song was written in 1967 by Mike d’Abo, who was then the lead singer of ‘Manfred Mann’. D'Abo describes the song as "saying to a teenage girl that the way to happiness is not through being trendy. There are deeper values."

In November 1967, singer Chris Farlowe was the first to release a version of the song, produced by Mike d’Abo. It reached Number 33 in the United Kingdom. In 19732, Rod Stewart recorded his cover version and released the song, but it peaked at Number 42 in March 1993 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart. Although it was never a hit single for Stewart in the UK, it experienced some renewed popularity following its use for television series ‘The Office’

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It is easy to sometimes criticise people for spending all their spare money on fashionable clothes and other garments, and the young have always attracted their fair share of criticism in this regard. For a young person, clothes are one of the prime ways of establishing one’s own identity within one’s peer group and distinguishing oneself from their parents and other adult groups.

I know that as a teenager, I couldn’t wait to leave school and get into work. Being the oldest in a family of seven children, I spent much of my earlier life before starting work in a mill at Cleckheaton, being unfashionably shod ( having to wear wellingtons to play out in during warm weather while I saved my shoes for school attendance), and wearing jumble sale clothes on my back, which like the cat, had often seen nine lives and had been passed on too often to be graced with the title of any longer being classified as ‘second hand’ garments.

My memory of earlier life was one of ‘live and make do’. However badly holed my socks got with wear, being woollen, they could always be darned by the nimble fingers of any mother of the day. But worn shoes with holes in the sole were an entirely different matter! My dad was a collier working at the coal face in the mines ten hours a day, but he wasn’t a cobbler. So, I learned to do what every other boy from poor households also did; I had to ‘walk on air’ like a hovercraft. When the soles of my shoes wore thin and started to hole, mum would stuff the insides with stiff cardboard. This would help keep out the cold but not the wet ground when it rained too hard; and if you ever walked down a stony path, your feet would frequently be pierced through the cardboard.

Whenever the occasion came around that new shoes were bought for me through ‘Littlewoods’ catalogue (approximately 3 years to pay at 300% interest), no sooner than the agent had delivered them to our house, my father would go to work on them in the garden shed before handing them back to me for wearing to school. I never had two pairs of shoes that were called school shoes and ‘Sunday Best’ shoes. My new shoes catered for every day of the week and every occasion in it. My new shoes would be heavily styled like a part-boot and be of the robust kind, made to last. By the time that my dad had tipped the heels and capped the toes with steel, I looked more like a miniature miner than a nine-year-old boy going to school.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t an unhappy child, growing up in a large family with little money, but even children born to poor and loving parents sometimes feel that life can be unfair. After all, there are only so many times that a schoolboy without a school satchel can credibly claim to have either lost it on the way to school or had it pinched! Being the firstborn in a materially poor family encourages one to cry in private and tough it out in public.

Because of being unable to walk for three years after a serious life-threatening accident at the age of 11 years, and the numerous operations I then had on my damaged legs (over 50 operations), I grew to regard my feet and legs as being the most important part of my body. Though my legs had been badly broken and mangled after my body was twisted around the main axle of the wagon which knocked me down and ran over me, and although the medics said I’d never be able to walk again due to a spinal injury, my old legs never gave up on me. When my damaged spine miraculously regained its proper functioning, my legs were able to once more get back into limping action, despite one of them having no kneecap and the other being three inches shorter than its mate.

Just as soon as I started to earn my own money from being a worker instead of a scholar, I swore never again to wear cheap shoes or dress in any garment that didn’t feel good to wear. It didn’t matter if it was underpants concealed beneath my trousers, socks hidden inside the shoes I wore, or a handkerchief concealed inside my pocket; each of these items were of the finest and best quality that money could buy. Had I been a woman, I’d probably have gone out to work in silk knickers every day! I became determined in adult life that never again would I wear anything substandard.

As a working teenager, I spent the whole of my first wage package on a new pair of fashionable shoes. In the 1950s, one’s parents allowed a young person to keep all of their first wage package, however poor the family was. Thereafter, one tipped up the weekly wage packet unopened to one’s mother and she would give you a small amount back to spend on yourself. No teenager objected to this practice, as their mother was only expecting the working children of the family to do what they’d witnessed their working father do all his life. That was the way it was. Until well into the 1960s; one tipped up their unopened wage packet to their mother as a working teenager, and when they married around the age of twenty-one ( barring shotgun weddings, when they wed earlier), the son-turned-husband carried on tipping up his unopened wage packet to the new woman in his life; his wife.

Given that women have always been able to make one pound stretch farther than any man ever could, it has always amazed me that we don’t have more female Chancellors of the Exchequer looking after the nation’s finances. I suppose that the shopkeeper’s daughter from Grantham (First Lord of the Treasury as well as Prime Minister) was the closest the country ever came to witnessing household management in Government at its best. It’s little wonder all the women in the land liked her and voted her into Government. Whatever their menfolk thought of Margaret Thatcher’s overall policies, all the mothers in the land understood her financial logic inside out!

I recall as a teenager, that I would get in gang fights weekly. Often, such fights would either be over a young woman’s honour or occasionally, her dishonour. Even an ‘excuse me’ gesture on the dance floor to another young man whose partner you wanted to dance with, would be considered enough of an insult to start a gang war instantly. However, fights could also start over something trivial, like looking too long at the wrong person or spilling his coffee as you accidentally bumped into him in a crowded coffee bar.

In all the physical fights I had between the ages of 16 years and 21 years, I never once worried about getting a black eye or a broken arm in battle. There was, however, something I always feared much more; scuffing my good shoes or getting my expensive clothing torn or soiled.

The single thing that made me the maddest I could be would be to get a new suit ripped whilst fighting and rolling around on the floor or someone stepping on my fashionable, highly polished shoes. Whenever any of these things happened
(between the ages of 15-17), I would go berserk and might finish up breaking my opponent’s arms and legs or damaging some other part of his anatomy out of revenge. Then, after a friend of mine had half his ear chewed off in a fight in a dance hall ‘free for all’ as he grappled on the floor with his opponent, I became determined that in any future fights I ever had, I would stay upright and never go down again.

Between the ages of 17-21, I attended a Judo Hall in Heckmondwike three times a week, as well as becoming a member of a Boxing Sport’s Club in Batley once a week. I also engaged in every sport that my uneven-sized legs allowed. While I played rugby every Saturday afternoon, I frequently got sent off the field for fighting more times than I finished a game. I engaged in these activities for two main reasons. One was to regain better balance of my body after my two legs had been left of unequal lengths after my numerous operations, and the second reason was to be able to win a fight stood up throughout, where there was less chance of me damaging my clothes or scuffing my shoes.

Today, I unashamedly always have the best of shoes and the most fashionable of clothes, although I had to wait until after the children had all grown up and left home before I could indulge my dress tastes to my pocket. I am probably a snob now when it comes to wearing the best. If asked to choose between the two, I would always wear more expensive shoes on my feet before having the dearest clothes on my back, and I’d rather be seen in a good jacket and trousers without one penny in my pocket than wearing some run-of-the-mill garments with every pocket stuffed with £50 notes.

I guess it’s very much like a woman I once knew, who, when she felt a bit fed up or depressed, would go upstairs and put on the most glamorous pair of knickers she owned and then go out for a walk. It mattered not that the fine undergarments were concealed and wouldn’t be seen by another; it just made her feel the ‘bee’s knees’ to walk about in swanky knickers beneath the plainest of dresses. I guess she felt about her knickers the same way I felt about my fine shoes, and for similar reasons to me; making up for what she materially missed out on as a growing child.

I also recall my mother carrying a red leather purse with her whenever she went out shopping. The purse wasn’t a cheap one and was made from the finest and softest Moroccan leather. If opened, one could see that the purse never held more than mere pennies or a few shillings, but it made my mum feel good to carry a purse fit for the finest of ladies; a purse that looked expensive enough to hold £1000.

I’ve never understood how any woman could spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds on a handbag, especially if one knew what rubbish such expensive fashion items usually contained. If you asked me to guess the contents of a woman’s handbag, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea; but, if you pressed me to speculate, I’d guess it might hold a few wrapped toffees (soft sweets if the owner wore dentures), pieces of crumpled tissue paper (used and unused), and some chap’s telephone number scribbled on a business card (perhaps a plumber who once fixed your leaky pipes or a good-looking painter and decorator who wallpapered your bedroom to satisfaction the three months your husband was working away on the oil-rig platform in the North Sea. Ensconced somewhere in the corner of the handbag might be a half-eaten apple that is on the turn! Whatever the expensive handbag contained, I’d bet my bottom dollar that it would be nothing of any significant value? No doubt, you ladies will soon tell me if I’m way off the mark.

So, if there’s any woman out there who is down in the dumps and feeling a bit depressed, nip upstairs, get out your most expensive handbags, pop on your glad rags and finest pair of knickers, along with your smartest pair of shoes; and hit the town with one of your lady friends. And if one of your lady friends doesn’t want to paint the town red with you, fish out one of those telephone numbers in your handbag and I feel sure that good-looking painter and decorator and he’ll gladly paint the town any colour you fancy!

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 14th January 2020

14/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friend, Enda O’Driscoll from Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary.

‘The Twist’ was a dance inspired by rock and roll music and was to become a worldwide dance craze between 1959 and the early 1960s, enjoying immense popularity.

Today’s song is ‘The Twist’. This song was written and originally released in early 1959 (having been recorded on November 11, 1958) by ‘Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ as a B-side to ‘Teardrops on Your Letter’. Ballard's version was a moderate 1960 hit, peaking at Number 28 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart.

]It would be Chubby Checker’s 1960 cover version of the song which gave birth to the Twist dance craze. His single became a hit, reaching Number 1 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ on September 19, 1960, where it stayed for one week, and setting a record as the only song to reach Number 1 in two different hit parade runs when it resurfaced and topped the popular hit parade again for two weeks starting on January 13, 1962. In 1988, ‘The Twist became popular again due to a new recording of the song by ‘The Fat Boys’ featuring Chubby Checker. This version reached Number 2 in the United Kingdom and Number 1 in Germany. In 2014, ‘Billboard Magazine’ declared the song the "biggest hit of the 1960s”.

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Being a teddy boy who liked rock and roll and Bopping above all other kinds of dances. And yet, while I enjoyed the occasional Twist on the dancefloor, what I and my mates really enjoyed, was seeing the attractive young ladies as they crouched and twisted as low as they could in their short mini-skirts. It was simply impossible for the young female Twisters to go down and maintain their balance without engaging in the unladylike opening of their knees for support and proper grounding.

Of course, there is no gain without pain, and it was simply impossible to ‘get an eyeful’ unless the male Twister also went down with their woman all the way! It took a while before the young women realised that they were showing their colours to their male partners as they waved and wriggled their butts left and right. Once the women Twisters realised that they were showing off ‘their all’ to any Tom, Dick and Harry they Twisted with, many of them decided to Twist in exclusive groups of female Twisters, and let the chaps watch from afar at the side of the dance hall floor.

After the Twist era faded away, all the Boppers were happy to return to the Bopping scene again. With the passing of each year of the 1960s, the good times returned. The mini-skirts and dress lengths got shorter by the year. I can’t remember an era that would prove to be better, freer, and faster in the pace of change than the 1960s. The pill liberated many young couples, but also led to an absence of behavioural control and resulted in a good degree of moral laxity. Many youngsters started smoking pot, sliding in the music festivals of mud, and hippies in San Francisco gave flowers away to passers-by on the street. Communes spread, along with the birth of weird cults; students marched in constant protest against the bomb and the Vietnam War instead of studying in class, and Hovis was the best thing since sliced bread!

I went to Canada to live for a few years in late 1963 to 1965 and I would be in my fifties before a friend at a party got out an old Twisting record and I tried to Twist my way all the way down again. But, alas, it was too late. The Twisting era had long since passed, yet my increasing rheumatoid arthritis in my legs decided to hang around; making it impossible for me to achieve anything but an undignified crouch that was more associated with pain than dance. I was able to carry on Bopping until I reached 70 years of age, but during my 70th year, my leg mobility lessened and my rheumatic arthritis severely worsened. Then, after I developed terminal blood cancer, my dancing days were well and truly over.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 13th January 2020

13/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my allotment neighbours and close friends, Brian and V’ron Moorehouse from Haworth.

Today’s song is ‘Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown’. This song was written by American folk-rock singer, Jim Croce. Released as part of his 1973 album ‘Life and Times’, the song was a Number 1 pop hit for him. ‘Billboard’ ranked it as the Number 2 song for 1973.

Croce was nominated for two 1973 Grammy Awards in the ‘Pop Male Vocalist and Record of the Year’ categories for ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’. It was his last Number-1 single before his death on September 20th of that year.

The song's title character is a tall man from the Southside of Chicago whose size, attitude, and tendency to carry weapons have given him a fearsome reputation. He is said to dress in fancy clothes and wear diamond rings, and to own customised cars; implying he has a lot of money. One day in a bar he makes a pass at an attractive, married woman named Doris, whose jealous husband proceeds to beat Leroy brutally in the ensuing fight, which Leroy loses badly. Croce's inspiration for the song was a friend he met in his brief time in the US Army. The story of a widely feared man being beaten in a fight is similar to that of Croce's earlier song, ‘You Don’t Mess Around with Jim’.

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When I was a probation officer in West Yorkshire, there were many scary situations that I found myself in over the 26 years I was in the job. All new probation officers were told early on in our career, that the only thing the Service couldn’t supply us with, but which we’d constantly need to do the job safely, was a pair of eyes in the back of one’s head. All Probation Officers also needed the seventh sense informing us when to stay alert and on our guard.

Essentially, however large or small a person we were, whether male or female, experienced or a raw recruit, we were subject to the same risks in carrying out our work. I must admit that that given the number of extremely dangerous situations I faced in my 26-year career, I was fortunate to have been assaulted only once, and that was by a woman in her forties who weighed no more than nine stone and stood no taller than 5 feet 6 inches.

She wasn’t aiming to strike me on the shoulder with the poker she wielded in her hand during a house call I’d made; she was really out to clobber her husband whom I foolishly decide to shield with my body during his wife’s sudden attack. She had been telling me during our interview prior to her poker attack that she’d caught him cheating on her the previous week with his sister-in-law when. The fact that she was currently pregnant made the thought of his infidelity (and who with) too much for her to cope with. Each time the thought of his betrayal came to mind, she would launch into an attack on her husband, determined to do him as much physical damage as she could. Had I known the full facts before I decided to stand between him and his wife as she aggressively advanced, there would have been no way I’d have taken a poker to my shoulder on his behalf!

It is part of a Probation Officer’s job to interview all manner of offenders in the police or prison holding cells. Such cell interviews would be carried out between their arrest and being produced before the court prior to sentence, or immediately after their prison sentence and being conveyed to prison. They could be minor offenders being interviewed or rapists, arsonists, wife beaters, armed robbers and even murders. The police officer or prison officer in charge of the defendants would invariably ask if the interviewing Probation Officer wanted them to remain present; depending on the manpower available at the time. Every probation officer knew, however, that they wouldn’t be a cat in hells chance of obtaining the personal information required from the prisoner with a burly policeman or prison officer waving their truncheon in the background. So, often the only way to get the job done and to get back home before supper time was to ‘take the risk’ and interview the prisoner without backup.

Being in the presence of violent offenders who would rip one’s head off without giving it a second thought if they sensed you feared them, essentially made those Probation Officers who did not exude fear, the more effective ones (and incidentally, the ones at less risk of being physically assaulted than more fearful colleagues). A confident Probation Officer had a healthy fear level during the course of their duties but never showed their fear in the presence of dangerous people. These were occasions when, to remain safe, one silently acknowledged one’s fear and managed it, instead of foolishly repressing it. I frequently thanked God for the extent of my relaxation knowledge in being able to defuse tense situations which could easily blow up into something more serious.

I once recall interviewing a very aggressive man in Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court. I was in my first year of training at the time and the Judge had delayed sentencing the man until the court Probation Officer (me) had ascertained several personal facts from the defendant. As the offender was stood down to the cells beneath the court to await sentence while I interviewed him, I was told by a prison guard that we were unable to have the interview take place in the usual cells on the ground floor. I, therefore, had no choice but to interview this highly aggressive man in the landing holding cells. The guard showed me to the holding cell that contained three offenders and locked me inside with them before going back up to the courtroom dock above with the next offender to be sentenced. He said he’d be away for around ten minutes but did not show his face for another hour.

I cannot deny that being in a cell with three violent offenders was one of the most dangerous situations I would find myself in over my lengthy career. I was shit scared but knew that if I showed an ounce of fear, I’d be physically assaulted by one of the three offenders in the cell. I must have been as relieved as I’d ever been when the guard finally returned and made some excuse about the court case above taking longer than anticipated because the defending barrister went on at great length, arguing for his client to receive a few years imprisonment only instead of the five years he eventually got.

I also recall being in a prison in South Yorkshire during the 1980s when a riot broke out. The prison had once been an old army camp before being taken over and used to house young prisoners. The prison had eight wings that contained the prisoners, but unlike a usual prison which housed all the wings within one huge building, each wing was its own contained building and was scattered fifty feet apart. The eight prison wings had been seemingly left as eight separate buildings on the same large site, on the working assumption that if ever inmate unrest or riot broke out, that the trouble could be contained to the wing in question and not spread to the other seven prison wings.

I was in the process of walking towards one of the wings to visit an inmate when the riot siren went off. Initially, I thought it was a fire as there was smoke in the background coming from a far wing that I later discovered prisoners had set on fire. Then, around thirty men yelling and carrying anything they could grab hold of to use as weapons ran across the open ground towards me with menacing faces as they cursed and issued threats towards a group of six or seven officers nearby. The rioting prisoners had wrecked and set ablaze their wing before running riot. They were determined to do as much damage as they could to prison guards and prison property. I thought my time had come and I could hardly believe my eyes when the screaming mob ran straight past me, ignoring me as if I wasn’t even a pawn on their chessboard.

The most aggressive and violent man I ever knew was ironically also one of the nicest men one could ever meet ‘when he was sober’. He stood around 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed over twenty stone; not an ounce of fat on him. He was an uneducated giant and one of the most aggressive men ever to come out of Ireland. A keen bodybuilder, his neck muscle veins would ripple whenever his anger started to rise, and his shovel-sized fists could bust a man’s jaw with one punch. He was called George, and for over four years, he remained under my supervision.

George came from a large Irish family who’d originally travelled the English countryside in a huge caravan until they eventually settled down in Huddersfield in the area of Almondbury during the 1960s. George had a vicious temper on him that would only reveal itself when he was under the influence of drink. Catch George sober and you’d think you’d caught the gentlest of butterflies, but to be in his presence when he was drunk and angry was to find oneself caught in the eye of a human hurricane.

George was not a hardened criminal in any true sense of the word. As far as I knew, he’d never stolen in his life, and the only offence he’d ever committed, he’d, unfortunately, committed dozens of times over the years. George had a taste for the hard stuff and was an ‘on/off drunk’. He worked at the scrap yard when I knew him and would go without an alcoholic drink for months on end. Then, he suddenly begins drinking and would go on ‘a bender’. The only way George would stop drinking again would be when he was back inside prison, usually serving a sentence for criminal damage and assaulting police officers during the course of his arrest.

During the 1970s, persistent offenders would receive ever-increasing lengths of prison sentences each time they appeared before the court for committing the same offence, and ‘Assaulting a Police Officer in the Execution of his Duty’ carried a minimum prison sentence of six months for a first offence.

We once worked it out that George had served a total of ten years inside different prisons since his first arrest at the age of twenty years. One could, however, have easily held the view that while these ten years of imprisonment had occurred as a result of having been successively convicted of ten separate police officer assaults, each one of these offences of assault on a policeman had been committed on ten separate occasions when George had got drunk. A sympathetic drinking mate of Georges might have concluded that poor George had got imprisoned for ten years for having been drunk ten times!

A common scene would be that George would visit a pub sober and drink until he was as drunk as a skunk. At this stage, all previous agreeableness he displayed to other patrons and bar staff would instantly vanish and his argumentative and aggressive side would emerge. George would finish up verbally offending another drinker and generally making a scene, cursing and issuing threats to any man who dared to intervene. When the bartender refused to serve George with any more alcohol, this would be the spark that lit the dynamite fuse. The gentle giant would become a green-eyed monster and everyone sensible would keep well out of George’s reach. He would demand that he be served more beer and the brave bartender would refuse and threaten to phone the police. The threat of police intervention was like a red rag to a bull, and George would kick off and kick out at anything and anybody who stood in the way of himself and his next pint of beer.

Being aware of George’s violent nature when drunk, the landlord would phone the local police to arrest George for being drunk and for creating a disturbance and minor criminal damage. The police would arrive, George would refuse to be arrested and all hell would break out. The arresting police officer would usually finish up badly hurt, and what started as a verbal dispute would usually finish in total carnage. It was not unheard of to find the pub totally wrecked and patrons or police officers being taken away in an ambulance.

As the years progressed and George’s pattern of violence against the arresting police officers became more common, whenever landlords phoned the police to evict a drunken George from their public house premises, realising what they would most likely face, half a dozen policemen would arrive on the scene to arrest George, waving batons as they brought him to the ground. No longer was the Huddersfield Police prepared to approach a drunken George on a one-on-one basis; it was more than their lives were worth.

Any physical resistance by George to being duly arrested automatically constituted another offence and subsequent conviction of police assault, attracting a six month’s prison sentence. When George was convicted of six separate assaults on six arresting police officers within the same incident, the only mercy from the Judge that George might receive was to have each six-month prison sentence imposed 'concurrently' (meaning he’d serve six month’s imprisonment in total), instead of having the sentences ordered to be served 'consecutively' (meaning he’d serve three years imprisonment in total).

The song ‘Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown’ instantly reminds me of George; the ‘baddest’ man in Huddersfield when he was on the drink.
Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 12th January 2020

12/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to Marie-Ann Mathot who lives in the Hague in the Netherlands. Marie-Ann was a classmate of my wife Sheila when they were schooled at the same educational establishment in Singapore over fifty years ago.

My song today is ‘When The Grass Grows Over Me’. This is a song by George Jones. It was released on the Musicor label in 1968 and rose to Number 2 on the Billboard country singles chart. It was written by Don Chapel, Tammy Wynette’s husband before George. The song is similar in theme to Jones' later comeback hit ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’.

‘When you left, I thought that I would soon be over you
Even told myself that I would find somebody new
Time and tears have come and gone but not your memory
But I'll be over you when the grass grows over me .'

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It is sad when after a relationship breakdown between a married couple that the acrimony between them is sometimes carried to their graves. That is essentially the theme of this song by George Jones.

I once heard a tale that my mother used to tell (but cannot testify to its veracity) about an Irish couple who lived in Dublin. They grew up in the same street, attended the same school, had been baptised by the same parish priest, attended the same church and played together daily. Their parents were the closest of neighbours, and their children had been the best of friends all their childhood. As time went on, it only seemed natural for the couple to become girlfriend and boyfriend when they entered their early teens.

Their courting became ‘over passionate’ and the young girl became pregnant three months before her 16th birthday. She and her 16-year-old boyfriend (who my mother told me was called ‘Billy’ like myself), decided to get married in 1917, one year after the ‘Easter Rising’.

This ‘Rising’, also known as the ‘Easter Rebellion’ was an armed insurrection by the southern Irish during the Easter Week of April 1916. Launched by Irish republicans to end British rule in Ireland and establish the independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was fighting the ‘First World War’, the Easter Rebellion was to be the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798. Sixteen of the Rising's leaders were executed in May 1916 after General Maxwell assumed the authority to do so under his own declaration of Martial Law. However, the insurrection, the nature of the executions, and subsequent political developments ultimately contributed to an increase in popular support for mounting Irish independence.

One of those Irish rebels was Joseph Plunkett who was executed in Kilmainham Gaol in May 1916. Joseph Plunkett was the father of the young girl in question.

When the young pregnant Plunkett girl married her lifelong neighbour, best friend and father to her unborn child, she walked down the church aisle on the arm of her uncle (her father’s brother). The couple’s early years of marriage witnessed continuous insurrection by the Irish rebels which were rekindled in earnest between 1918 and 1919.

During the three years since their marriage, there was no work to be had in Dublin and her young husband, Billy, joined the insurgents to farther the Irish cause. It was during his time ‘on the run’ as a member of the I.R.A. after the end of the civil war around 1924, when the relationship between Billy and the mother of his children (he’d also fathered a second child) irreparably broke down.

Often Billy would be ‘on the run’ between the south and the north, and it was during this time that his wife and the mother of his children was arrested by the British, interviewed at length in custody and then released. She indicated to her neighbours that the British occupiers wanted to know where her husband Billy was but said she’d sent them on a wild goose chase, telling her interrogators they’d separated and that she’d not seen her husband since the birth of their second child.

According to my mother, it later transpired that Billy’s wife entered into an extramarital relationship with an English soldier, and being ashamed and afraid of what the neighbours would think, and what her husband would do when they found out she had turned traitor, she uprooted and travelled across the Irish Sea to live out the rest of her life. Her father would have ‘turned in his grave’ to learn that not only was his daughter an adulterer but that she was also a traitor to her country, having given the British information about the identity of other insurrectionists she knew of. Once the British had obtained this information, they released her, knowing that she’d be branded an outcast by her own neighbours and the men she’d betrayed.

The young woman’s name became forever blackened in the eyes of the Dubliners and her husband Billy (whom she never divorced) grew to hate and despise her with a venom he never knew was possible. According to my mother, Billy spent the bulk of his remaining life rambling the streets as a town drunk and constantly cursing his wife and damning her eternal soul. Billy would frequently lament whenever her name was mentioned by another, “Will I ever be rid of her?” The shame of her Irish betrayal seemed to taint his character also, and after the troubles had died down and he no longer played a significant role in the I.R.A., his contribution to the Irish Cause would be swiftly forgotten and he’d be constantly referred to as ‘the man whose wife was an Irish collaborator and traitor to the flag’.

Billy reportedly died an unhappy drunk, filled with deep hate and vengeful thoughts about the wife who’d betrayed all he stood for. My mother reported that he’d be frequently heard cursing his wife, saying, “I’ll never know a moment’s peace until I am dead and buried six feet under the grass. Only when I’m dead will I be free of her!” But as with all Irish tales, especially by the ones either told or woven by my late mother, there is a twist in the tale?

Billy seemingly died during the 1960s and his wife (who never remarried) lived in bitter regret for what she’d done until she died in 1980 at the age of 79 years. She had prior to her death arranged to have her body returned to Ireland to be buried in the same cemetery as her husband, Billy. Still being officially married to Billy, she was able to share the same plot and was buried immediately above him! There was also matching headstones, identifying the couple as man and wife and proud parents of two children.

So, it looked that poor Billy couldn’t escape the presence and influence of his wife, even in death. Neither could he have said (if the dead could talk), “I’ll be over you when the grass grows over me” as being beneath his wife’s coffin, there was only soil over him; the grass was over his wife’s coffin!

I cannot tell you for the life in me if that tale of my late mother was true or false, but I can undoubtedly say, it was a good one, and well told!

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 11th January 2020

11/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to Sandra Chapman from Heckmondwike whose birthday it was yesterday and whom I didn’t find out soon enough to dedicate my song to. Forgive this belated birthday song dedication, Sandra. As we say in Yorkshire, “Better late than never, and never on a Sunday morning after a boisterous Saturday night!”

Sandra was the Head Secretary and Clerical Manager in the Dewsbury Probation Office until her retirement several years ago. We worked in the same office for many years and Sandra was noted for her extreme courtesy and kindness to all staff, especially newcomers. She was also a member of an amateur musical society and an extremely good singer who performed many leading roles in their annual shows. I hope that you had a most enjoyable birthday, Sandra with your loving husband, Bill. In fact, with a name like 'Bill';, how could he be any other than 'a loving husband’?

Today’s song is ‘I’d Love You To Want Me’. This the title of a popular song from 1972 by Lobo (the stage name of Roland Kent LaVoie). He wrote the song, which appears on his album ‘Of a Simple Man’.

Released as a single in the fall of 1972, ‘I'd Love You to Want Me’ was the singer's highest hit on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart, where it spent two weeks at Number 2 in November of that year. The single was the second of four of his songs to hit Number 1 on the ‘Easy Listening Chart’ in December 1972. It became a ‘Gold Record’.

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I once knew a woman who never seemed to get the type of man she could settle down with. Her name was Mavis and she lived in a caravan with her 7-year-old son, that was parked in a field in the area of Emley in Huddersfield, close to the Yorkshire Television transmitter mast.

I originally met Mavis during the 1980s when I worked as a Probation Officer in Huddersfield. I had been requested to do a ‘Social Inquiry Report’ for the local Magistrate’s Court as to her means and general situation. Mavis had been fined by the court previously and hadn’t paid a penny off her fine. Court sentence was adjourned for a month (with a view of giving Mavis a brief prison sentence in default of payment). It wanted a Probation Officer to check out Mavis’s situation, especially as receiving a prison sentence would automatically place her 7-year-old son in Care of the Local Authority.

Today, an offender can burgle an occupied house in the dead of night, or mug and rob old person on the public High Street, or sexually assault a young woman, or stab a rival gang member and still escape a prison sentence when caught; whereas during the 1970s and 1980s, a single parent/mother of a 7-year-old child could be imprisoned without the blink of an eye for non-payment of a court fine!

I was given Mavis’s address (which was incomplete) and asked to interview her. The address she had given the Magistrate’s Court had no house number. It bore only her full name, followed by 'Off Jagger Lane', Emley, Huddersfield. The night I visited Mavis to complete the report for the Magistrate's Court, I searched for the better part of an hour before I eventually located her with the help of a villager. He only knew of her because she was a single parent with a 7-year-old son, and Emley was the smallest of villages, where everyone knew everything there was to know about each other, especially if it involved a bit of scandal or salacious gossip. These were the years where the first parts of the local weekly newspaper looked at were the 'Orbituary' and the 'Court Sentence' sections. This was the era when the height of village gossip between next-door neighbours primarily concerned, 'Who'd died? How old were they?, and how much did they leave in their estate?', along with 'Who'd been fined for not having a dog or a television licence, or for beating his wife within an inch of her life?'

It transpired that Mavis (who was in her mid-late twenties), and her son, lived not in a house but in an old caravan. Instead of identifying her general location as being ‘Off Jagger Lane’, Mavis would have been more accurate in describing her precise location as being ‘Off an old dirt track which ran off Jagger Lane and led to a derelict outbuilding in a farmer’s field'. Mavis lived in the farthest field which had panoramic views of outer Huddersfield, apart from being the closest resident to the 'Emley Moor Television Transmitter Mast'.

After assessing the situation of Mavis, it became apparent that she needed help and could benefit from being the subject of a Probation Order rather than being sent to prison for fine default while her young son was taken into Care of the Local Authorities during her absence. These were the days when Probation Officers were much more than parole-officer contact points and had the necessary training skills, adequate resources and enough time to devote to clients, getting to know them in the most helpful of ways.

The upshot of Mavis’s situation can best be summed up by her having had an unhappy upbringing as a child in a large family, with all her male siblings being perpetrators of petty crime. She left home at the age of 15 years after becoming the target of sexual abuse by an older brother.

Her initial decade between 15-26 years, witnessed her having a string of failed relationships (five cohabitees in total), and living with partners who could best be described as ‘losers’ and ‘a waste of space’. The first man Mavis lived with was 10 years older than her, and the couple started living as man and wife four months before her 16th birthday. He had been her son’s father, but when he learned that Mavis was pregnant by him, he took off, leaving her penniless, and never contacted her or his son thereafter. An aggressive partner had been violent towards her and frequently beat her so badly that she once spent three weeks in the hospital. Three other men she lived with, never held down a job long enough to collect a full week’s wage. Mavis told me that they idled away their time at her home, living off her, while she went out to work part-time in a café in Kirkburton.

After two years of Probation Officer contact with Mavis, she seemed to have turned around her life. She still had a long way to go but was at last headed in the right direction. She and her son gave up their caravan and moved out to Oldham where she’d been allocated a flat.

Mavis used to tell me during our office discussions that she was always a compliant partner and would do whatever her man wanted her to do at the time, in order that she might feel closer to him. She used to say to me, “I don’t need much to be happy, Mr Forde. All I want is for someone to love me for who I am, and for them to want me too!”

Today’s song, ‘I’d Love You to Want Me’ reminds me of Mavis. Her son would be in his mid-to-late thirties now. Have a nice day, everyone.
Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 10th January 2020

10/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my dear Irish friends from Kilmeaden in County Waterford in Ireland, Rene and James Power. This lovely, married retired couple live a few miles from where I was born and ran a holiday establishment for many years, which the Forde Family (through their numerous visits and paid stays there) probably kept solvent by their patronage for a decade or more. It always irked my six siblings and their partners that Rene always gave me ‘a special rate’ (a lower price than my siblings), as well as always allocating me their biggest and finest bedroom.

My nickname for Rene has always been ‘The Duchess’, and I address all my mail to her in this way. I give her this title because, quite frankly, she lives like one and she always treats me like Royalty whenever I stay at her home. The postman genuinely believes that he daily delivers to royalty in the splendid Kilmeaden, 14-roomed bungalow. I always spend overnight at the home of Rene and James whenever I visit Portlaw (the village of my birth; a few miles away). Although they no longer accommodate paying guests, I am the only Forde they make an exception for since their retirement; much to the chagrin of my siblings who now have to seek less salubrious accommodation in Waterford City whenever they visit Portlaw.

Today, I will recite a poem about ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ at Avoca, and that will be followed by my own rendition of an old Irish song the poem refers to; ‘Sweet Vale of Avoca’.
Today’s song is ‘Sweet Vale of Avoca’. The ‘Avoka’ (Irish: Abhainn Aboca) is a river in County Wicklow, Ireland. It is contained completely within the county. Its length is 35 miles (56.3 km).

The Avoca starts life as two rivers, the ‘Avonmore’ (Irish: Abhainn Mhór, meaning ‘Big River’) and the ‘Avonbeg (Irish: Abhainn Bheag, meaning ‘Small River’). These two rivers merge together at a spot called the ‘Meeting of the Waters’ (Cumar an dá Uisce) in the Vale of Avoca, which is considered a local beauty spot, and was celebrated by Thomas Moore in his song of the same name. The ‘Avoka’ flows into the Irish Sea at Arklow, where it widens into a large estuary, giving Arklow its Irish language name an t-Inbhear Mór (the Big Inlet).

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Although I was born in Ireland and my family is rooted in Irish culture, it was only a few months ago when I learned about the ‘Meeting of the Waters’ in County Wicklow, read the lovely words to Thomas Moore’s song, or heard it sung in that wonderful operatic voice of the Irish singer Maureen Hegarty.
Mary (also known as Maureen) Hegarty is an Irish opera soprano singer. She was born in Fermoy, County Cork, and she studied singing at the ‘Cork School of Music’ with Maeve Coughlan, representing Ireland at an early stage at the ‘Cardiff Singer of the World’ festival in 1985.

Although I only heard this song by chance in 2019, I was asked to look up Mary Hegarty in the 1990s by the late Earl of Harewood (Cousin to Queen Elizabeth 11). The Earl was a friend of mine, whom along with his wife, the Countess of Harwood, publicly read from my children’s books on three or four occasions during the 199Os in West Yorkshire school assemblies. Despite his royal connections, he was a down-to-earth and highly cultured man whose greatest love was the opera.

George Henry Hubert Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, was a British music director and author. In fact, he was one of the most authoritative opera experts in the world and held many offices in the realm of the operatic and cultural world of music. A music enthusiast, Lord Harewood devoted most of his life to opera. He was director of the ‘Royal Opera House’, Covent Garden from 1951 to 1953 and again from 1969 to 1972. He served as Chairman of the Board of the ‘English National Opera’ and was also its Managing Director. He was the Artistic Director of both the Edinburgh and Adelaide Festivals and from 1958 to 1974, and he was General/Artistic Director of the ‘Leeds Triennial Musical Festival’. He was Managing Director of the ENO offshoot, ‘English Opera North’ from 1978 to 1981. Lord Harewood also served as a governor of the BBC from 1985 to 1987.

He was the author of three highly acclaimed books on opera, with ‘Kobbe's Complete Opera Book’ being among the most noted. The Earl was a close friend to all the great opera singers around the world like operatic diva, Maria Callas. I was humbled to be more of an acquaintance than contact to the Earl and Countess, and I attended Harewood House by invitation on a few occasions over our years of acquaintanceship.

In the mid-1990s, I came across a marvellous singer with the operatic voice of a Pavarotti, who was working as a textile labourer in a mill in Slaithwaite, Huddersfield. Paul was his name and his only stated love was singing operatic songs that he’d learned since his childhood. Paul sang opera all day long (at home and at work) because he loved singing opera. He would sing in a Dewsbury pub on Friday night and at social gatherings of friends and family. He sang out of enjoyment and without any ambition in the slightest of ever progressing to a professional singer.

Even with my own limited knowledge of Opera, I could instantly tell that Paul was the best-untrained voice I’d ever heard. I made Paul the ‘Top of the Bill’ in a Charity Concert that I was presenting at ‘The Leeds City Variety’ to raise funds for the ‘Hollybank Trust’; an award-winning residential care home in Mirfield which caters nationally for severely handicapped children and young people who are too disabled to live at home. This special fund-raising concert of mine was attended by the Earl and Countess of Harewood as special guests. It was undoubtedly the presence of the Earl and Countess that persuaded the theatre Manager to allow me to present the show at this world-famous theatre (I was the first normal citizen given the privilege of doing so). The Earl agreed with my estimation of Paul’s singing and said he was prepared to give Paul an introduction to ‘Opera North’.

I approached Paul and told him what I thought and the marvelous opportunity that the Earl was offering him. In retrospect, I’d have to say that it was most unwise of me to encourage Paul to initially entertain the thought of singing professionally for a living and then persuade him to go for an audition with ‘Opera North’. At the time, I believed that I was offering Paul an unenviable introduction that was little short of a dream. The problem, however, was that it was my dream that I’d put in Paul’s head and not his dream I encouraged him to dream.

Paul’s audition was successful and ‘Opera North’ instantly agreed to take on the Slaithwaite mill worker after hearing him, but then Paul had a sudden change of heart. Paul liked his simple way of life over the years that brought him as much adulation for his opera singing from his mill mates and drinking pals as he needed, without any of the rigorous daily disciplines that would be demanded of him over a four-year period, were he to take up the offer from ‘Opera North’(that would also involve learning the Italian language between a punishing week of other learning).

When push came to shove, Paul wasn’t prepared to push away a life he knew and loved, in order to undertake the change in his lifestyle that would change him, his surroundings and way of future life. He was simply unwilling to do what was required, to have the opportunity of becoming a big opera star.

Since that day, I have accepted never to get anyone anything they don’t ask for. Unless the first move in the form of a specific request comes from them, I leave well alone. A person’s head should never be filled with the dreams and aspirations of another!

A few weeks after informing the Earl of Harewood for Paul’s decision not to proceed, the Earl contacted me by letter, and knowing that I was Irish by birth, he inquired if I’d heard of an Irish Opera singer named Maureen (Mary) Hegarty and suggested I look her up if I hadn’t. I’m ashamed to say that it was not until some seven years after the Earl died that I looked her up Maureen (Mary) Hegarty. That was the first time I heard, Maureen’s marvelous voice. One of the non-operatic songs she sang was ‘Sweet Vale of Avoca’; the song I sing for you today, backed by ‘Our Lady’s Choral Society’.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 9th January 2020

9/1/2020

I dedicate my song today to my Great Grand Nephew, Brandon Foster, who lives in Fareham in Hampshire. Brandon is 24 years old today. He is the grandson of my brother Peter and sister-in-law, Linda, and the son of parents, Janie and Chris Foster (my niece and nephew), and the sibling of Shannon and Charley. Have a smashing birthday, Brandon and leave a bit of room for lots of cake and ale. Love from Great Uncle Billy and Sheila x

Today’s song is ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’. This song was written and recorded by Neil Diamond in October 1970. The song became Diamond's first American Number 1 hit on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’, and his third to sell a million copies. It was his breakthrough single on the ‘UK Singles Chart’, reaching Number 3 for four weeks in November and December. Billboard ranked the record as the Number 17 song of 1970. It also reached Number 2 on both the ‘Australian Singles Chart’ and the ‘Irish Singles Chart’. Its best performance was in New Zealand, where it stayed at Number 1 for five weeks at the end of the year.

Married to a catchy and dynamic melody and arrangement, the lyrics suggested to some a devotion to a woman of the night. But, ‘Crackling Rosie’ is a type of wine. Diamond heard a story about a native Canadian tribe while doing an interview in Toronto, Canada. The tribe had more men than women, so the lonely men of the tribe would sit around the fire and drink their wine together, a scene that inspired him to write the song. The title has also been interpreted to be a misspelling of a rose wine which is ‘crackling’—a U.S. term equivalent to pétillant or lightly sparkling.

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I have only ever known one young woman who was called Rosie. When I say ‘known’, I literally mean it in the biblical sense. Rosie was born in County Limerick in Ireland, but I was to meet her on the steps of the Cleckheaton Town Hall one Saturday night in 1960 as I attended the rock and roll dance with half a dozen friends from Windybank Estate.

Rosie was an only child who’d moved to West Yorkshire with her parents six years earlier. She worked as an apprenticed hairdresser, which essentially meant that being less than three full years into a five-year apprenticeship, she still made the tea and swept the floor but had progressed to washing, rinsing and curling the hair of patrons in her third year at the salon.

I and my mates had spent the first three hours of that evening visiting three or four pubs as we walked two miles down the road to Cleckheaton from ‘The Old Pack House Inn’. The distance it took to walk between the watering holes we visited was usually just enough to get all our belching done before gulping another pint of beer down our throats in one sup at the next pub. I never saw the point in guzzling beer down and probably drunk the least in our group. I always preferred romance to drink, and brunettes always went down better with me than brown ale. Three or four pints would be my usual Saturday night limit, while the others could down double the amount I drank.

I’d have to say though, that in regards of getting a good-looking young woman to dance with and to walk back home with at the end of the night when the dance was over, my success rate was double theirs.

The night I first met Rosie, I accidentally knocked her down as I ran up the steps one minute before the clock struck 10:00 pm with my five or six mates. The man on the door was a stickler for time and would bar all entry after the official closing time to enter the Town Hall arrived. The reason that all dancing entry was barred after 10:00 pm was to prevent the drunks from getting in and creating havoc. That is why the lads tended to drink as much as they could before entering the dance at 10:00 pm.

After I’d accidentally knocked Rosie down rushing up the steps past her, she let out a cry of anguish that instantly stopped me dead in my tracks. I thought she’d sprained a leg when she cried out, “You…you silly bugger, you’ve ruined my tights. I won’t be able to dance now. Who’s going to dance with me now?” Seeing her looking at her bruised leg, it instantly became apparent that it wasn’t an injured leg that had upset her but a laddered pair of the finest denier stockings she wore. None of her friends had a spare pair and she had a big ladder that had holed in hers. After Rosie angrily cried out, ’Who’s going to dance with me now?” I looked at her picking herself up off the steps and feeling sorry for the damage I’d caused, I jokingly said, ‘I will!”

When we got inside and could get a good look at each other, neither victim nor assailant was disappointed with what we each saw in the other. She saw an overconfident 18-year-old with the combined looks of Marty Wilde and James Dean, and I saw a beautiful looking young woman with long brunette hair that sat astride the top of her head in a Helen Shapiro beehive hairstyle. Her dress wasn’t anything to write home about, but her looks were stunning, and her slim figure and womanly form were completely captivating. Her legs, although bruised and now without stockings, were legs to die for! They went all the way up to heaven.

Initially, Rosie seemed indecisive as to whether she ought to slap me across the face or to accept my invitation to dance. Fortunately for me, a good night was had. While Rosie was Irish and proud to be so, because I had no Irish accent, I had a difficult time persuading her that I’d also been born in Ireland but came across to England when I was 4 years old. We dated for five weeks (that meant meeting Rosie inside Cleckheaton Town Hall on a Saturday Night five times), but the third Saturday of our acquaintanceship fell on Christmas Eve.

That night was to prove memorable for us both. Rosie lived in Liversedge in an area called ‘Crossed Keys’. The area had got its name from one of the oldest inns in Yorkshire. She was the only child of professional parents. On Christmas Eve of 1960, I called at her house to collect her for the dance instead of meeting her outside the Town Hall. When she opened the front door, the first thing I looked at was her stunning legs. I wanted to see if she was carrying a scar from our first meeting. Rosie was wearing a Chinese style dress with a long slit down one leg that provided occasional sight of her thigh as she moved. My wife, Sheila informs me this style of dress is known as a ‘Cheongsam’.

“Will you come in for a Christmas drink?” she asked. “Mum and dad have gone out for a Christmas Eve meal in Dewsbury and won’t be back before 11:00 pm.” The upshot was we never did go to the dance at Cleckheaton Town Hall that night. In fact, we stayed in the lounge all evening and only left the house at 10:30 pm (on my suggestion), half an hour before the expected return of Rosie’s parents. I was wary of meeting them, and because I'd absolutely no intention of settling down into a steady relationship with any woman, I saw little point in getting to know them!

That was a most memorable Christmas Eve during the first 18 years of my life. We walked and talked and stopped and kissed and walked and talked some more. The last thing on my mind that Christmas Eve was attending Midnight Mass in Cleckheaton, (something I usually did with my mum and sisters, Mary and Eileen). We must have walked for around six miles up the Halifax Road, and as I walked Rosie back home early Christmas morning around 1:00 am, it started to snow. Those few snowflakes falling from the sky rounded off my Christmas morning of 1960 far better than I could ever have imagined when leaving my parent’s home, the evening before, to collect Rosie.

I was 18 years old at the time and had no intentions of settling down until I was around thirty, however beautiful or loving the young woman on my arm happened to be. Besides, I’d just been appointed the youngest textile shop steward in Great Britain, and I’d also been offered a scholarship at Ruskin College to fast-track me in the trade union movement. But more than wanting any of this, I yearned to travel abroad and to test out the waters as a singer, as I then had a very good crooning voice and fancied myself as a new Bing Crosby or Dean Martin in the making.

Besides, when it comes to the fairer sex, there is something such as ‘having too much of a good thing’’. It may be good for one’s teenage ego to have a highly attractive young woman hanker after you, but it plays havoc with a young man’s Catholic conscience who ‘can’t do right for doing wrong, and can’t do wrong for doing right’.

I continued seeing Rosie for two more weeks into the New Year of 1961 before I ended our relationship. I would occasionally see Rosie dancing with her friends at the Cleckheaton Town Hall during most of 1961, and there were occasions when I came close to weakening my resolve to ‘leave well alone’. The simple fact was our brief contact had proved too good to continue outside marriage or self-respect. I never danced with Rosie again, but I would smile and wave or say a polite hello when we passed. She was too beautiful a person and too dangerous a young woman for any substantive relationship between us to be encouraged and allowed to continue. Canada was still in my sight and I’d no intention of narrowing my horizon.

Three years later, my Christmas Eve of 1963 was spent aboard the S.S.Sylvania. I was bound for Canada, where I would live for two years between 1963-65. While my first two months in Canada led to me discovering, that although I was indeed a very good singer (I sang for a living for two months in a Montreal Night Club called ‘The Last Chance Saloon’), I also learned that I wasn’t the best singer in the world and that there were indeed many better! Possessing the (then) character flaw that I had, I decided that if I couldn’t be the best singer in the world, I’d stop playing the game. So, I took my bat home and gave up my singing job at the age of 21 years. I would be 75 years old before I sang to a public audience again.

I rarely think of Christmas Eve/Christmas Day 1960 these days. Indeed, the only time I think fondly and briefly of that Christmastime Rosie and I ‘spooned’ together is whenever I hear this Neil Diamond song, ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’.
Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 8th January 2020

8/1/2020

I jointly dedicate my song today to Carol Law who lives in Riddlesdon, Keighley, and Terry Baldwinson, each of whom celebrates their birthday today. Carol has been a family friend for years and Terry is an 80-year-old Facebook contact from Leeds, whose daily runs puts the nation to shame and whose wit always keeps a smile on my face. Carol has a heart of gold and as for Terry’s ticker, it’s certainly healthier than chaps who are thirty years younger. Have a super birthday both of you.

I also dedicate today’s song to Lynne Robinson from Leeds. Lynne’s husband Richard sadly died over a year ago and he would have been 70 years old today. I know that Richard is greatly missed by his family and new grandchild that he never saw and that the sentiments in today’s song is highly pertinent to all of them and resonates with their feelings. As today’s song says, ‘My Heart Will Go On’. The person may pass away but the love for them and memory of them always remain. My feelings are with you and your family today, Lynne. God bless you all. Please accept my dedicated song as a celebration of the life of Richard and the love you shared.

My song today is from that iconic film scene from the Titanic where Kate Winslet is poised at the front of the sailing vessel, held aloft by Leonard de Caprio as the song ‘My Heart Will Go On’ is sung by the Canadian singer, Celine Dion. The song’s music was composed by James Horner and the lyrics were written by Will Jennings.

Released as a single from Dion's fifth English-language studio album, ‘Let’s Talk About Love’ (1997), and the film’s soundtrack, the love power ballad became an international hit, reaching Number 1 in over 20 countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. ‘My Heart Will Go On’ was first released in Australia and Germany on December 8, 1997, and in the rest of the world in January and February 1998. It is considered to be Celine Dion’s signature song and with worldwide sales approaching twenty million, it is one of the best-selling singles of all time and became included in ‘Songs of the Century’ by the ‘Recording Industry Association of America’.

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All three of today’s birthday celebrants, whether alive or posthumous represent the human heart beating at its best. It is not enough for a heart to just tick in a healthy beat; it must also be capable of feeling love, compassion, forgiveness, charity, happiness, and sadness. It is the presence of these human traits that make up a wholesome heart and it is the expression of such characteristics in one’s body actions that make the world turn on its axis of love.

The medics tell us that when the brain stem dyes, so do the person. But I tell you most truly, that when the heart no longer feels for its fellow human beings, the process of a living death has already commenced. I now know that when my dear late mother used to tell me as a child ”Billy only do what your heart tells you and not your head”, she must have instinctively known that our head will reason and rationalise our dispensation of love, whereas the heart will see what is invisible to the eye.

I have seen people with a broken heart who feel compelled to live in the past and who feel lost to the prospect of future love and life. I have also known people with gentle hearts who express love with such naturalness and ease that it is impossible for a recipient of their love not to respond in kind. I have also known folk who are said to be bitter with the world and find it too difficult to express loving feelings towards another or to find love in their hearts to express. One can only express that which resides in the heart, and sadly one’s heart is closed to allowing love entrance to it. In such circumstances, the heart remains in hollow emptiness. Such a person is said to ‘have a hard heart’ or behave ‘hardheartedly’, when their heart isn’t ‘hard’ but ‘closed’.

Once we open our hearts, become more receptive to the love of others and allow all the love that touches us to enter, there will never be a ruler long enough to measure the amount of love our heart is capable of holding. The more we love, the more we get back, and the more we get back the more we can give out again! Any child who has a loving mother will always find its mother’s heart the safest place of refuge at difficult times.

Have a nice day everyone. Love and peace Bill xxx