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      • No Need to Look for Love
      • 'The Love Quartet' >
        • The Tannery Wager
        • 'Fini and Archie'
        • 'The Love Bridge'
        • 'Forgotten Love'
      • The Priest's Calling Card >
        • Chapter One - The Irish Custom
        • Chapter Two - Patrick Duffy's Family Background
        • Chapter Three - Patrick Duffy Junior's Vocation to Priesthood
        • Chapter Four - The first years of the priesthood
        • Chapter Five - Father Patrick Duffy in Seattle
        • Chapter Six - Father Patrick Duffy, Portlaw Priest
        • Chapter Seven - Patrick Duffy Priest Power
        • Chapter Eight - Patrick Duffy Groundless Gossip
        • Chapter Nine - Monsignor Duffy of Portlaw
        • Chapter Ten - The Portlaw Inheritance of Patrick Duffy
      • Bigger and Better >
        • Chapter One - The Portlaw Runt
        • Chapter Two - Tony Arrives in California
        • Chapter Three - Tony's Life in San Francisco
        • Chapter Four - Tony and Mary
        • Chapter Five - The Portlaw Secret
      • The Oldest Woman in the World >
        • Chapter One - The Early Life of Sean Thornton
        • Chapter Two - Reporter to Investigator
        • Chapter Three - Search for the Oldest Person Alive
        • Chapter Four - Sean Thornton marries Sheila
        • Chapter Five - Discoveries of Widow Friggs' Past
        • Chapter Six - Facts and Truth are Not Always the Same
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        • Chapter 1 - 'Return of the Prodigal Son'
        • Chapter 2 - 'The early years of sweet innocence in Portlaw'
        • Chapter 3 - 'The Separation'
        • Chapter 4 - 'Separation and Betrayal'
        • Chapter 5 - 'Portlaw to Manchester'
        • Chapter 6 - 'Salford Choices'
        • Chapter 7 - 'Life inside Prison'
        • Chapter 8 - 'The Aylesbury Pilgrimage'
        • Chapter 9 - Sean's interest in stone masonary'
        • Chapter 10 - 'Sean's and Tony's Partnership'
        • Chapter 11 - 'Return of the Prodigal Son'
      • The Alternative Christmas Party >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
      • The Life of Liam Lafferty >
        • Chapter One: ' Liam Lafferty is born'
        • Chapter Two : 'The Baptism of Liam Lafferty'
        • Chapter Three: 'The early years of Liam Lafferty'
        • Chapter Four : Early Manhood
        • Chapter Five : Ned's Secret Past
        • Chapter Six : Courtship and Marriage
        • Chapter Seven : Liam and Trish marry
        • Chapter Eight : Farley meets Ned
        • Chapter Nine : 'Ned comes clean to Farley'
        • Chapter Ten : Tragedy hits the family
        • Chapter Eleven : The future is brighter
      • The life and times of Joe Walsh >
        • Chapter One : 'The marriage of Margaret Mawd and Thomas Walsh’
        • Chapter Two 'The birth of Joe Walsh'
        • Chapter Three 'Marriage breakup and betrayal'
        • Chapter Four: ' The Walsh family breakup'
        • Chapter Five : ' Liverpool Lodgings'
        • Chapter Six: ' Settled times are established and tested'
        • Chapter Seven : 'Haworth is heaven is a place on earth'
        • Chapter Eight: 'Coming out'
        • Chapter Nine: Portlaw revenge
        • Chapter Ten: ' The murder trial of Paddy Groggy'
        • Chapter Eleven: 'New beginnings'
      • The Woman Who Hated Christmas >
        • Chapter One: 'The Christmas Enigma'
        • Chapter Two: ' The Breakup of Beth's Family''
        • Chapter Three: From Teenager to Adulthood.'
        • Chapter Four: 'The Mills of West Yorkshire.'
        • Chapter Five: 'Harrison Garner Showdown.'
        • Chapter Six : 'The Christmas Dance'
        • Chapter Seven : 'The ballot for Shop Steward.'
        • Chapter Eight: ' Leaving the Mill'
        • Chapter Ten: ' Beth buries her Ghosts'
        • Chapter Eleven: Beth and Dermot start off married life in Galway.
        • Chapter Twelve: The Twin Tragedy of Christmas, 1992.'
        • Chapter Thirteen: 'The Christmas star returns'
        • Chapter Fourteen: ' Beth's future in Portlaw'
      • The Last Dance >
        • Chapter One - ‘Nancy Swales becomes the Widow Swales’
        • Chapter Two ‘The secret night life of Widow Swales’
        • Chapter Three ‘Meeting Richard again’
        • Chapter Four ‘Clancy’s Ballroom: March 1961’
        • Chapter Five ‘The All Ireland Dancing Rounds’
        • Chapter Six ‘James Mountford’
        • Chapter Seven ‘The All Ireland Ballroom Latin American Dance Final.’
        • Chapter Eight ‘The Final Arrives’
        • Chapter Nine: 'Beth in Manchester.'
      • 'Two Sisters' >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
        • Chapter Fifteen
        • Chapter Sixteen
        • Chapter Seventeen
      • Fourteen Days >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
      • ‘The Postman Always Knocks Twice’ >
        • Author's Foreword
        • Contents
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
        • Chapter Fifteen
        • Chapter Sixteen
        • Chapter Seventeen
        • Chapter Eighteen
        • Chapter Nineteen
        • Chapter Twenty
        • Chapter Twenty-One
        • Chapter Twenty-Two
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Song For Today: 31st January 2021

31/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to all you women, who in the past, dared to strut the floor in high-heeled stilettos as you went about your man-hunting travels.

My song today is ‘High Heel Sneakers’ (often also spelled "Hi-Heel Sneakers"). This is a blues song that was written and recorded by Tommy Tucker in 1963. Tommy Tucker's original recording reached Number 1 on the ‘Cash Box R&B Locations Chart’ and Number 11 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart. In 2017, the song was inducted into the Blues Foundation ‘Blues Hall of Fame as a ‘classic of blues recording’.

Numerous musicians have recorded ‘High Heel Sneakers’ such as Johnny Rivers: Elvis Presley: Chuck Berry: Jerry Lee Lewis and Davis Cassidy to name but a few. 

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As a female fashion item, the popularity of stiletto heels changed radically between the 1960-80s. After an initial wave of popularity in the 1950s, they reached their most refined shape in the early 1960s, when the toes of the shoes which bore them became as slender and elongated as the stiletto heels themselves. It would be the 1980s however before the height of some stiletto heels could graduate to a pointed base six inches away from the shoe’s under-sole. For the women wearing them, it must have seemed like high-wire-walking on a pair of daggers! God only knows how any woman could walk in comfort and safety, and not topple, fall down and break a leg in the process. 

The one sure thing that can be said about high-heeled stilettos is that women did not wear them for comfort or safety, but instead, they used this footwear of female fashion as a means of male enticement, to enhance the visual excitement and sexual pleasure of men, as well as carrying a legal form of a deadly weapon, in the event of needing protection. The discomfort that some women were prepared to go to in order to attract the male eye. 

I worked as a Probation Officer between 1971 and 1995. During that time, I came across many women who had seriously maimed a man or another woman by various means. In some instances, the women concerned had been pushed too far and had snapped in violent response, but many were women who could not control their excess aggression and who lashed out at a man or a woman during an argument on a night out. Such physical assaults were usually the result of an insulting comment, even a side-ways look between two women, or jealousy. Most physical assaults were committed under the influence of alcohol. Some assaults are too gory to describe, and the instruments of assault varied from a glass, a knife, a chair, a hair spray, etc. However, during the 1980s, the most common form of female weapon chosen to inflict physical bodily harm upon another (especially on alcohol-fuelled Saturday nights) was the heel of a stiletto shoe. In all instances, it was potentially deadly, especially if stuck in the head of another! 

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 30th January 2021

30/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants. We wish a happy birthday to Pipperdee Milton who lives in London, Chris Brennan who lives in Kilkenny, Ireland, and Rita Power who lives in my birthplace of Portlaw, Waterford, Ireland. Enjoy your special day, Pippadee, Chris, and Rita. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Endless Sleep’. This song is a teenage tragedy pop song that was written and originally recorded by rockabilly singer Jody Reynolds in 1957. This song created a trend of "teen tragedy" songs after its release. In Britain, the song was covered by Marty Wilde, whose version reached Number 4 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’, becoming his first chart hit. I first became acquainted with the song after hearing Marty Wild’s version of it.

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I recall several teenage tragedy songs during the late 1950s and early 1960s that were spawned after this song was released. Unfortunately, teenage tragedy has continued apace ever since and shows little sign of ever abating. I strongly suspect that we shall see a surge around the world again in the future after the current pandemic virus is brought under control.  

The deliberate ending of life in western societies (suicide) and other countries are far too high. Statistics show that youth suicide attempts are more common among girls, but adolescent males are the ones who usually carry out suicide. 2017 national statistics show that 75% of all suicides were committed by males and from these figures young men made up the largest category of suicides. Suicide rates in youths have nearly tripled between the 1960s and 1980s. For example, in Australia suicide is second only to motor vehicle accidents as its leading cause of death for people aged 15–25, and according to the ‘National Institute for Mental Health’, suicide is the third leading cause of death among teens in the United States.

There are many reasons which may lead a young person to seek to end their own life, and my heart goes out to every parent whose life has been shattered by such a loss. No parent ever expects to die after their child; such was never meant to be the way.

When I was a Probation Officer in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire between 1970-95, I will always remember one mother from the Batley/Heckmondwike area. Her only son was an 18-year-old who was obsessed with fast cars but who could never afford to possess one., One Christmas Eve, he stole a high-powered vehicle and took it on a ‘joy ride’. The police spotted him in the stolen car and gave chase, and as the stolen car was driven towards the traffic lights at an excessive speed, the lights changed to red in the distance. Sensing that they now had the car thief cornered, the pursuant police car increased its speed to catch up as the stolen car slowed down. The traffic lights ahead crossed the Leeds Huddersfield Road, which was notorious for fast traffic.  At the very last moment, the 18-year-old driver of the stolen car, put his foot on the accelerator pedal and crossed the red lights as a stream of speeding traffic came across him. He collided with another vehicle at high speed and was instantly killed.

Just before Christmas day, the mother of the dead boy was contacted by the police, and as she opened her door and saw the two police constables who had come to inform her that her son was dead, her face was filled with shock realisation as opposed to tears. It would seem that a few hours earlier she went to her son’s bedroom and instead of finding him there, she found the room empty. On his side table by his bed was a note he had written. The note said everything she feared without saying anything specific. It was along the lines “I have to go, Mum. I won’t be back. Luv you.”

During later months, I had some statutory contact with the deceased boy’s mother. She told me that her deceased son had been depressed for many months prior to his death for reasons his mother did not know, but he had never threatened to take his own life. The bottom line was that the bereaved mother’s hurt and inability to bring some closure to the death of her son was adversely affected more by the ‘possible intention’ of her son and the unsettledness of his mind that last time he left home than his fatal car collision. It was as though she could accept her son being dead, had he died as the result of a horrific car-crash accident on Christmas Eve, but she could not bring closure to her bereaved state of being if she believed he had deliberately ended his own life. She never knew or would know if his death had been the result of a ghastly accident or by suicidal intent? This interminable doubt in her mind was created by the note he left behind in his bedroom that Christmas Eve.

I know from experiences too close to home, the traumatic effect that the suicide of a family member has on the loved ones left to grieve their loss. It is hard to emotionally come to terms with the decision of a loved one (especially one’s child) to end their own life. I fear that during the years ahead, as the dust from this current pandemic virus cloud clears and starts to settle, this country and many more nations will come to see the tragic consequences of the accumulative deterioration caused in the nation’s mental health problems because of the recent, current, and future consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic virus and the severe restrictions on our freedom and lives the virus imposed from March 2020 onwards. My greatest fear is that we will see a significant rise in suicide cases, especially among the young. 

I dearly hope and pray that I am wrong in this fear, and I urge parents of adolescents to establish good communication channels with their loved ones, even when they provide their typical teenage responses of “leave me alone- I’m alright as I am- get off my back!’” The very best of all communications that we all need (whether acknowledged or not) is to be told “I love you”, especially when those precious words come from the mouths of mum and dad.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 29th January 2021

29/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to Rosemary Poweromahony who lives in Halifax but was born a few miles from my Irish birthplace, and my dear friend, Bob Dudley. who lives in Batley, West Yorkshire. Both Rosemary and Bob celebrate their birthdays today. Enjoy your special day, Rosemary and Bob.  

My song today is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”. This song was written by Bennie Benjamin, Horace Ott, and Sol Marcus for the singer and pianist Nina Simone, who recorded its first version in 1964. "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" has been covered by many artists, most notably by ‘The Animals’ whose blues-rock version of the song became a transatlantic hit in 1965.
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My mother often told me as a child, “Billy, the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. At the time, immaturity and an absence of worldly wisdom prevented me from understanding this proverb. I found it hard to get my young head around the notion that I could not do right for doing wrong.

I have frequently wondered how often some person somewhere has heard the pitiful cry “No one understands me”? We all fall foul of not understanding others occasionally, as well as being misunderstood. Such is the destiny of any two individuals who deign to communicate with each other with the sole intention that their dialogue will result in an amicable meeting of minds.

I have previously mentioned the two brothers from the area of Huddersfield who fell out and did not speak to each other for over a decade after their father died, and yet they continued to live in the same farmhouse. They had stopped talking to each other for so long that neither brother was able to remember what had initially led to this long silence between them. This situation highlights the folly of allowing the misunderstanding of a moment to last a lifetime. Their situation also reminded me that the longest distance between two minds has always been one of misunderstanding.

As a Probation Officer for twenty-seven years, I encountered many people telling me that they were misunderstood and that their wife, husband, parent, children, girlfriend, boss, or some other significant person in their life “does not understand me.” I rarely accepted this statement at face value as they were really communicating to me (albeit unknowingly) that so and so ‘did not like them’ or ‘did not respect them’ or ‘did not accept their view’ or ‘did not love them’.

For over twenty-five years as a Probation Officer in West Yorkshire, I ran hundreds of groups in numerous community settings. I once recall one woman sharing her own experience with the group. She had fallen out with her friend because when she was short of money and needed a loan, she asked her friend who refused, without providing an explanation as to why she could not loan her the money.

The group initially tended to side with the disgruntled borrower, but after they had been put through several role-play scenarios that I presented them with, they were able to accept that being ‘appropriately assertive’ in one’s behaviour necessitates recognising the personal rights of each person. Such recognition gives anyone the right to make a request, but it also involves the right of the other person to refuse that request ‘with or without an explanation’.

I pointed out there are many occasions when personal circumstances and private details prevent an explanation from being provided, and while it may be easier to accept a refusal to one’s request, does not mean it is desirable or appropriate to explain the reasons behind one’s refusal.

Some people find it extremely difficult to understand that ‘personal rights’ involves both people in the situation and is never a ‘one-way street’. Most people naturally expect a best friend to have a less personal right to decline your request than say another person you know well. 

Imagine someone asking you for a loan of money, perhaps a friend. To refuse such a request without an explanation requires a high level of ‘appropriate assertion’ as a certain degree of discomfort is created. Nine out of ten people who do not believe in loaning money to be always helpful to the borrower will invariably make up some excuse which cannot be easily discredited like saying “I’m so sorry, I would if I could but ….” instead of telling the truth by saying “I’m sorry but I cannot because……..”

Providing an explanation is an ‘option’ for any ‘appropriately assertive’ person, not an ‘obligation’. The one role-plays which always worked to emphasise this dilemma was the following:

SITUATION/ RESPONSE: You and your workmate get paid every Friday. Every weekend, your workmate spends all his money and is flat broke until he is next paid the following Friday. You are careful with your money and try to spread it out to last the week. On Monday morning, your workmate asks you to loan him £5 until payday as he is broke. You loan him the money and he pays you back on Friday as soon as he receives his wage. On the following Monday, the same request for a £5 loan is made by your workmate again and you loan him the £5.  He pays you back as promised on Friday when he receives his next wage. This same sequence of borrowing and repayment goes on month after month. You want to end it, Do you tell your workmate the next Friday he comes to repay his £5 loan, “I tell you what, Jack. You keep the £5. Consider it a gift from me, and if you stash it away until Monday next, you will be able to get through the week without needing to borrow again”?
Or
SITUATION/RESPONSE: Do you point out to your workmate Jack when he next asks to borrow £5 until wage day, “I’m sorry, Jack, but I am not prepared to carry on loaning money to you every Monday morning. That £5 of mine that you keep borrowing from me is in your pocket as much as mine, so much, that it no longer seems to belong to me. Besides, I feel that I am not helping you to improve your own situation with my weekly loans, and it could be argued that I am preventing you from looking at your own problem situation. I do not know why you are skint every Monday morning as you earn the same wage as me, and we are both single with similar financial commitments. If you want to talk about your situation, I am always here to listen to you, but I will not loan money to you again as I am not helping you. I am simply making matters worse and I am prolonging an unsatisfactory situation”?

‘Being misunderstood’ is usually a situation where the communication between two people is neither ‘honest’ nor ‘appropriately assertive’. It is not always comfortable or easy to do the right thing, but if you hang on to the principle of recognising the personal rights of everyone in a situation, you will not go far wrong in your response.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx 


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Song For Today: 28th January 2021

28/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to Caroline D, Caz Astley who lives in Bolton, Greater Manchester, and also Liz Divine who lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Both Caroline and Liz celebrate their birthday today. Have an enjoyable day, Caroline and Liz, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is, “It’s Only Make Believe” This song was written by drummer Jack Nance and Mississippi-born singer Conway Twitty. Conway. The single topped both U.S. and the ‘UK Singles Chart’ and became the only Number 1 pop single of his career. The song was a hit in 22 different countries. It was also made popular by recordings by The Hollies, Glen Campbell, and Billy Fury.

I first heard the song sung by English singer, musician, songwriter, and actor, Billy Fury. Born in April 1940, Billy Fury died on 28th January 1983. Given that today is the 37th anniversary of Billy Fury’s death, it is appropriate to make my song today, one that he recorded and is associated with.

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I used to be a ‘Daily Mail’ reader for many years between 1980-1990, and I enjoyed following the daily views of a newspaper columnist called Ann Lesley. I will never forget her once writing “Things are invariably the opposite of what they appear to be”. While this was a philosophical view which I had held to be true for many years, I nevertheless began to view it anew as soon as I put the newspaper down. Ann’s description hit the nail on the head with perfectly applied force, and with far fewer words than I would have had to use to say the same thing. I marvelled with a tinge of writer’s envy how Ann Lesley had dressed a thought so commonly known, in clothes so exquisitely arranged. The beauty of the whole article instantly commanded the reader's admiration. Within me I felt a natural temptation and naked ambition of an inquisitive wordsmith to strip Ann’s description to the bone, thereby revealing the thought of her original idea and the marrow she chose to feed it with. 

Mind you, writing for a living was her daily work, and apart from a few brief articles I had penned for the magazine ‘Social Work Today’ at the time, I had not yet ventured into any form of paid professional expression. It would be 1990 before my first children’s book was published and I joined the ranks of a budding author wanting to be read by an admiring readership. It is only after 64 published novels later that I can honestly say that I write ‘okay’, but not okay enough that I fail to be frequently enthralled by the writing of many other authors, who possess such modesty of pen that they just cannot appreciate ‘how good they really are’.

I do not plan to write any more novels, and my writing these days is confined to my daily Facebook posts. This daily post involves the exercising of much restraint on my part. My preferred writing style is to adopt a conversational approach to whatever subject I am writing about. This is perfectly fine for delivering talks to an attentive audience, but the written word, as opposed to the spoken, performs better in a different style.

Often, my mind will become absorbed in a single thought, and before I realise it, an hour or so will have gone by and I will have typed a turgid treatise. Like a beer glass filled to the brim with overflowing content, a single mouthful forces the drinker to digest too much in one taste. When my writer’s imagination takes flight, it is liable to land anywhere. My mind tends to stray so much that I am frequently surprised that anyone reads anything I ever write at all.

If there is an art in writing, it rests in knowing the nature of one’s readership. I have always worked on the safe assumption that there are essentially two kinds of readers; those who see, and those who see ‘when they are shown’. One kind is the lazy reader who lies on a sun lounge at the side of a swimming pool and neither wants to move body nor mind unnecessarily while they thumb the pages and chill out. This type of reader likes the understanding of any text to be spelled out on the page without any need to think. The more engaged readers around the pool will appreciate that authors often mean much more than they say and that one sentence can carry two meanings. They require a deeper understanding that can only be arrived at by diving into the writer’s pool of thought several times. Whichever readership one predominantly writes for determines one’s style of writing.

The most important benefit derived by any author is having the opportunity to express oneself, by expressing one’s feelings, and views in the written word. Some authors seek to enlighten, some want to educate, and some wish to entertain. Some, like the original-stated aims of the B.B.C., sought to do all three. Good writers engage, excite, exhilarate, and send the mind of the reader on a journey they never want to end. The greatest danger of all authors is that we get to like the sound of our own voice too much, and we often get lost in the forest of words we plant on the page.

Any author seeking common acclaim and desiring words of praise inscribed on their tombstone can always commission the work themselves with the stonemason before he dies. In that way, he should not be dissatisfied with what folk will think of him when they pass his grave in years to come, especially strangers who never knew the deceased, or heard his name before they walked through the cemetery that day. That is the way of the world when legacies are dreamed of by the living.

One of my firmest beliefs lends itself to the thought that there nothing which is either true or false, good or bad, that thinking it so will not make it so.  William Shakespeare’s character Hamlet echoes this belief of mine when he states in his play of the same name “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.  How easy it is for the bard to do an Ann Lesley on me any day of the week! 

Come to think of it, there has always been some dispute as to whether William Shakespeare was indeed the author of some of the famous works ascribed to him. It is known that he did commission the words on his tombstone while he still lived. Did you know that some believe that Shakespeare's grave is cursed? Even though Shakespeare knew he would be buried under a stone slab inside a church, Shakespeare was worried about grave robbers and people disturbing his bones. To scare off any potential thieves, Shakespeare wrote and commissioned the following epitaph as a deterrent: 

“Good friend for Jesus sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here. 
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.”
The curse is taken so seriously that as recently as 2008 construction workers were careful to work around the bones without disturbing them. Unfortunately, at some point, someone less reputable, and less afraid of curses, seems to have stolen his skull. Even the great Shakespeare was liable to lose his head in some circumstances.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx


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Song For Today: 27th January 2021

27/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to Amanda Marie Enright who originates from Carlow in Ireland but who now lives in Cork. We also wish a happy birthday to Diolun O Cleirigh who lives in the village of my birth, Portlaw, County Waterford, Ireland. Amanda and Diolun, enjoy your special day, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is “I Can’t Make You Love Me”. This song was written by Mike Reis and Allen Shamblin. It was recorded by American singer Bonnie Raitt in 1991. It became one of Raitt's most successful singles, reaching the top-20 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart and the top-10 on the ‘Adult Contemporary Chart’.

In August 2000, Mojo magazine voted "I Can't Make You Love Me" the eighth-best track on its ‘The 100 Greatest Songs of All Time’ list. The song is ranked at Number 339 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of ‘The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time’. On 27 November 2016, the song was inducted into the ‘Grammy Hall of Fame’. The song was also recorded by George Michael and Adele among other notable artists.

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I cannot make you love me, want me, or understand me. All that I can do is to hope that someday you will. The previous sentence is a self-evident fact but nevertheless, one would be surprised to learn just how often humans genuinely believe that they can force another to love them.

During my lifetime, I have come across the strangest of situations where an attempt to force ‘love’ upon another or efforts to force them to love you in return have been made by misguided, disillusioned, and occasionally dangerous people.

I recall when I was a Probation Officer in Huddersfield during the years 1970-90 coming across a woman in Holmfirth whose neighbours had called the police out several times and reported her partner for physically manhandling her. Because she was a woman of previous good character and her partner had served time in Borstal as a young man for physical assault, the police always took her side, even though her partner indicated she had started the physical altercation and not him. The bottom line was that his woman was constantly fearful that he would leave her, so she would resort to being physically abusive to keep him with her. 

I also knew another man who physically abused his wife with such frequency that he managed to convince her that his ‘hitting her’ was a sign of him ‘loving her’. I have known women believe that their partner’s jealous behaviour of the most aggressive kind merely demonstrated how much they were loved by him. 

I remember another man in Huddersfield who sexually assaulted three of his daughters in succession when they were between the ages of nine and twelve years of age. Then, as soon as the oldest daughter reached her thirteenth year of life, he had full sex with her on a regular basis, convincing her that such incestuous behaviour between a father and ‘his special daughter’ was an act of love. While engaging in full sex with his oldest daughter, realising that ‘his special relationship with her would not last forever, he began grooming the next daughter to move up ‘his special daughter’ chain of incest. Even after the father was subsequently reported to the police by the oldest daughter five years after she had left home and married, and the father was arrested and subsequently imprisoned; even then, the middle daughter he had progressed to having a full sexual relationship with refused to incriminate her father, and the youngest daughter had been groomed to believe that all sexual acts engaged in with her or perpetrated against her were ‘loving acts’.

For many years when I lived in Mirfield, I lived across from a young nurse who was stalked for at least four years (prior to stalking being made a criminal offence) by a man she had once agreed to have a cup of coffee with at Dewsbury Hospital. Following that innocent cup of coffee, the man in question convinced himself that he loved the nurse in question and that she loved him ‘only did not yet know it’. Convinced that she would eventually come to realise she loved him and convinced that they would one day marry, he would bombard her with flowers sent to her home and place of work, he would wait for her outside her work and travel back on the same bus, sitting a few seats behind her. When she got off the bus to go home, he would wave to her and smile. Then, there were the inevitable letters he sent to her, professing his undying love, and saying he could not wait until the day they were married. Because there was no threatening behaviour and no offence of ‘stalking’ then on the statute books, the police could take no substantive action. Eventually, the only way she could get away from her unwanted suitor’s ‘loving attention’ was to move accommodation and work to another part of the country. 

The most effective way I have witnessed one person attempting to persuade another ‘not to stop loving them’ and to ‘stay with them’ is to threaten to commit suicide. Too often this ploy has proved the consequence of a good person being so worried about the suicide risk of another that they have allowed their action to be influenced or controlled for far too long while they looked around for any safe means of ending their association with the other person. Only once have I personally found myself in a similar position, but once was quite enough, thank you. I would like to say with authority, that such a threat is invariably an action that is never carried out by the type of person who makes it, but experience over more recent years in my life would lead me to substitute the word ‘never’ with ‘rarely’.

When I was a romantic young man, I was always ‘falling in love’ but because I had no intention of getting married until was thirty, I did not want the responsibility of ‘being in love.’ What I always accepted about ‘falling in love’ was that it is an event that happens outside one’s control. One does not plan to ‘fall in love’, neither can one deign to bring it about! ‘Being in love’ on the other hand is a much more culpable act and involves a large element of choice. While it may be a moot point how much volition a person exercises to ‘be in love’, it seems to me that whether they ‘stay in love’ or ‘move out of love’ is one of total choice. As the song says, “I can’t make you love me if you won’t”.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 26th January 2021

26/1/2021

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IT IS CHOICE NOT CHANCE THAT DETERMINES ONE’S DESTINY’ 

I dedicate my song today to my wife’s parents, Peter and Elizabeth Williams, both of whom are deceased. Today is the heavenly anniversary of Dad Williams’ 99th birthday. Today is also the heavenly wedding anniversary of Dad and Mum Williams. The couple got married on Dad Williams’ 34th birthday.

In addition to the heavenly birthday and wedding anniversary of Sheila’s parents today, we wish a happy birthday to four birthday celebrants. We wish happy birthday to Jane Anne Sheridan who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada: Agnes Quinn who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary: John Hickey who also lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary: and my friend, Silvija Klova who lives in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. Have a lovely birthday, Anne, Agnes, John, and Silvija, and enjoy your special day.

Being a Christian is to believe that as the Creator, God is the cause of all our lives. If God is the cause, there are no coincidences, and it is choice, not chance that determines one’s destiny. Let me share some strange facts with you today that suggests that some marriages are made in heaven. I have always believed that we are destined to meet certain people in our lives at certain times of our lives and that stars collide in the galaxy at specific moments in time.

When Sheila and I married, I chose to marry on my 70th birthday. At the time of choosing to marry on my birthday, I was not aware that Sheila’s father and mother had also got married on the birthday of the groom. My own mother’s birth is officially recorded on the 24th, January 1922 but she told always told her children that her parents had recorded her birth wrongly and that she had been born on 26th, January 1922, and not the 24th. Nevertheless, my mother continued to celebrate her birthday throughout her life on January 24th but always reminded us two days later, ‘today is my proper birthday’. Initially, we joked that because she just wanted more presents, she decided to have two birthdays! In later years, my Uncle Tom (mum's youngest brother) confirmed that mum was born on January 26th, 1922.

Sheila’s father was born on January 26th, 1922, the same day as my mother said should have been her official birthday. Sheila’s mother was born in the Portuguese colony of Macau and her parents were Chinese. The Chinese culture leads to many Chinese who follow the Lunar Calendar to celebrate their Chinese birthday as well as, and sometimes instead of, their Solar Calendar birthday. Sheila’s mother chose to celebrate two birthdays, just like my mother did.

I shall conclude my course of destiny choices with one more pair of facts. I have loved four women in my life. Two of them had birthdays on the same day of the year though they were born five years apart. The two greatest loves of my life were my first love; a young woman called Jenny who I dated in Canada when I was 21 years old, and the last love of my life, my wife Sheila who I met at the age of 68 years when the last thing I was looking for was love and marriage. Although born in different years, both Jenny and Sheila celebrate the same birthday, November 29th. When I met my wife Sheila, she would spend half her days studying astrology, and naturally, she believes that there are times when things are meant to happen, and the part we humans play in our own destinies is through the choices we make and not the chances we encounter. 

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My song today is ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ This song was originally released as a single credited to Frankie Valli as a solo artist in 1965 but was more successful when recorded by ‘The Walker Brothers’ in 1966. It topped the ‘UK Singles Chart’, and it also became their highest charting song on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in the U.S., where it peaked at Number 13. The single also hit the Top 10 in Canada, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Norway. The Walker Brothers' version has since garnered retrospective critical acclaim and is considered the group's signature song. NME ranked the song at Number 357 on its list of the ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’, Pitchfork ranked it at Number 187 on its list of ‘The 200 Best Songs of the 1960S’, and it is listed in the 2010 book ‘1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die’.

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I have lived on this earth 78 years now and I cannot remember a year previously that has been as wet and as damp and as dreary and as scary as the one we have just had in 2020.  The pandemic virus, Covid-19 could not have picked a more suitable year to thrive in. The cold, damp and protracted miserable weather has provided a perfect climate cloak for this pernicious Covid-19 virus to do its worse and kill off as many innocents as it can!

Not only has the poor weather and this pandemic virus adversely affected the nation’s mood, the scarcity of clear skies, the desertion of dry days, allied to the total absence of the smallest chink of sunshine peeping through dark clouds has generally made the entire country feel like staying indoors and never showing their faces again! As I write, parts of the country are covered by snow, and parts are stricken with continuous floods.

I heard a young boy aged around four ask his mother as he passed the front window of our house the other day, “Mum, when is the sun coming out to play again?” Under more normal circumstances, it would be usual for the boy’s mother to have provided her son with some warm motherly reply, but sadly she did not say anything that answered the lad’s innocent question. Instead, she merely muttered beneath her breath, “You tell me, son? You tell me!”

God only knows what that poor woman has had to put up with over this past year, and I cannot begin to imagine the year of unanswered questions her young son has had to face in lockdown for a larger part of it? Childhood is meant to be the happiest and most inquisitive time of one’s life, when the favourite question on the tongue of every child to their mother begins with the word “Why….?” and when every motherly reply suggests, “Ask your father when he gets back home!” I can tell you for nothing that no Yorkshire dad is likely to be stumped at the wicket by a tricky question from his son. If the boy happens to see a pregnant woman, and after being told she has a fat belly because there’s a baby inside her then proceeds to asks his father the next inevitable question, “But Dad, how…how does the baby get out?” In this situation, Dad will answer his boy’s question with a straight bat and simply reply, “the same way it got in, I expect!”

Imagine any four-year-old boy having lost one-quarter of his life to press, living in a house of mounting worries and constant fear, with no fun to be had and fewer ice-creams and playing on swings in the park? Imagine a four-year-old witnessing worried parents each time another bill has popped through the letterbox, or seeing mum crying when she hasn’t hurt herself or hearing mum and dad shouting at each other about one of them spending too much on this and that when they haven’t enough money to eat properly? Imagine such a young boy hearing that dad has lost his job and has no chance of getting another one this year? Imagine having to move home, change schools and lose one’s friends because the bank has foreclosed when the mortgage went into arrears?  Imagine being a young boy whose unhappy parents make him feel sad and frightened, instead of safe and happy like they did last year? Imagine a four-year-old child having one whole year of happiness, exploration, excitement, learning, and fun took from their experience, and being replaced instead with unhappier times where mum and dad are no longer the smiling mum and dad he used to have?

We have all lost something during the past pandemic year, and however much of it we are able to recover, things will never be quite the same again for any of us, Some of us have lost our jobs, some of our marriages, our homes, and our businesses, and all those important things in life which offer us stability. Sadly, some of us have lost someone we love and have been unable to be with them and comfort them as they died. Then, to add hurt to injury, bereaved people have been unable to provide a proper send-off for their loved ones on their funeral days.  There have been so much that we have missed out on, so many important things in our lives that we have taken for granted for so long; things that none of us shall ever take for granted again when these dark clouds have passed over, as they shall. From all our loss, the loss of hope impairs us walking into the future in confident stride.

However old any adult is, at best, this past year had been a washout and a write-off. It has seemed to be a wasted year. Never forget that what has been one year for you has been no less than one-quarter of your 4-year-old child’s life. The past year of 2020 will only have been a total ‘wash out’ and a completely wasted year if we do not learn anything from it, and the experiences we have each endured in different measure are forgotten and have been to no avail!

So even though we have all thought over the past twelve months that ‘the sun ain’t gonna shine anymore’, please believe me when I forecast with certainty that it will! God willing, that four-year-old boy who recently passed my house window, shall see sunshine again. He shall see the daffodils of spring in the hedgerows of the country lanes pop their heads up through the long grass, and he will watch the new-born lambs run and prance around the green fields. He shall swing back and forth in the park playground, kick a ball around the garden, stroke the scaly skin of a captured frog, and splash in puddles, make sandcastles on the beach, kick the piles of autumn leaves on the woodland floor, throw snowballs and make a snowman, and be pulled along on a sledge by dad. The seasons of the coming year may still be stretched a bit farther over the next twelve months, but he can bank on Christmas, 2021. That Christmas experience will probably be the best Christmas ever in the life of a five-year-old child.

While the country and the world have gone through so much over the past year, there is so much to look forward to during the coming years. Just as the past year represents one-quarter of that four-year-old’s life, in terms of the life of the universe, it represents no more than a moment in time when the sun stopped shining down on us.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx


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Song For Today: 25th January 2021

25/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to two birthday celebrants. First, we wish a happy birthday to Teresa Dungan who lives in Piltown, Kilkenny, Ireland. We also wish a happy birthday to James Power from Waterford, Ireland. James and his wife Rene have been good friends of the Forde family for over thirty years. Enjoy your special day, Teresa, and James.

My song today is, ‘How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You’. This song was recorded by American soul singer, Marvin Gaye in 1965. singer from his fifth studio album of the same name. It peaked at Number 6 on the US ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in January 1965 and at Number 3 on US ‘Billboard’s R&B Chart’. Up to that point, it was Gaye's most successful single. 

I recorded this song in March 2020 (eleven months ago). This was three weeks after I had been discharged from ‘St James’ Hospital’ in Leeds. During the previous eighteen months, I’d had six different cancer operations, plus twenty sessions of radiotherapy. I had just undergone a neck dissection which took almost six hours on the operating table, during which time major surgery took cancer from my forehead, down my neck (removing all saliva glands), and beneath my throat. I did not know if the operation had put an end to my singing practice which I have come to love, and this was my first or second song I tried after that operation. I will not pretend that it pained me to sing the song, but it would have hurt me far more had I been unable to sing again after that big operation. I know that cancer in my cheek will spread and that was I to have another operation (which the medics consider too dangerous to undertake as it would be longer than the previous operation). Such an operation would result in the removal of all facial nerves, and leave me with a collapsed half-face (like a permanent stroke victim) unable to eat or speak properly. 

For the present, I have decided, (along with my cancer consultant), to do nothing, as life without being able to sing for me would be too great a loss of quality to endure. So, for the moment, I will carry on with my daily singing practice, and both you and I will know by a discernible deterioration in my singing when the aggressive facial cancer is on the move again. Meanwhile, I look forward to having a few hours of exercise and fresh air daily in our allotment between spring and autumn with my lovely wife, Sheila, and lots of new spuds to eat!

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Whereas there is no sweeter taste than ‘to love’ and to ‘be loved' in return, ‘falling in love’, on the other hand, offers much more than any saccharine introduction to the sweetness that follows. ‘Falling in love’ is the most enjoyable, exciting, and passionate of experiences imaginable. It is far more stirring than having six sugar lumps in one’s cup of tea, and much more potent than being knocked off one’s feet while floating on a force-nine love cloud. In the final analysis, the ‘falling’ part of the romantic experience represents an exquisite happening, more a ‘letting go’ of one’s wildest imaginations and a willing suspension of one’s reasoning faculties. Romantics allow this to happen by placing themselves directly in the path of a love storm, in the hope that when they eventually come back down to earth that the landing does not result in the shattered expectations of romantic disillusionment.

When I fell in love with my wife, Sheila, the strangest of all consequences ensued. Her selflessness had such a profound effect on me, it was as though it encouraged mine in part. She gave me access to her heart and her home without the asking of either, and I willingly took possession of both. From that first moment I knew I loved her, there was never a doubt in my head that what I felt for her was much more than passion and love. It was an awareness of a lifelong existence between two existentialists whose philosophy and love of life would provide an eternal bond which time itself would not end, or tension fracture, or struggle break. 

Such has proved to be the case, and we share the strongest of relationships that a man and woman can possibly enjoy, which is comprised of the mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of ourselves combined in marital union. While I have previously experienced loving and satisfying relationships, I had never enjoyed a spiritual partnership with the woman in my life also, and it is this added dimension that completes the circle of eternal love.                                                                                             

Over the past decade, since we first met on that cold December day in 2010, by allowing myself to be lost in Sheila’s heart and soul, I found myself in a new autumn of my life. It was a season of myself I had not previously known, and I discovered parts of my character I had never before given expression to. Before I knew Sheila, I would automatically shy away from the occasional compliments of others in the behaviour of ‘false modesty’, but since Sheila and I became a single loving entity, I can now allow myself to take the plaudits of others graciously because I know they are never meant for me alone, and that Sheila and I share them as a couple. The more impossible it became for anyone to compliment one of us without praising the other also, the easier it was to receive the goodwill of others as an affirmation about the two of us as a loving couple. 

I love you, Sheila Forde. You have made me better than I was and more than I am, and all this happened by taking your hand. For the first time in my life, I have loved a woman more than with my body and my mind. The spiritual dimension to our love (that I have never had before with any woman) will enjoin our lives on earth to the life we shall one day share in heaven. We are literally soul mates, and because of that, even when life on earth separates us when someone means as much as we do to each other, it lessens the distance and shortens the wait before we meet once more.

Love and peace. 
Bill xxx


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Song For Today: 24th January 2021

24/1/2021

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Today's written song is accompanied by a lengthy written post. This is the loving reflection of a son who still misses his dearly departed mother many years after her early death. The lengthy post should be read by interested parties only. Today's song was my dear mother's favourite song which she sang daily to me as I grew up.

I dedicate today’s song to my mother who died aged 64 years on 26th April 1986. Had mum lived on into old age, she would have been enjoying her 99th birthday today and would be no doubt downing as many free drinks of rum and blackcurrant as her seven children would have willingly bought her (national lockdown notwithstanding). They always say that the good die young, and family loyalty aside, they did not come any better than our dear Irish mum to her seven children, me, Mary, Eileen, Patrick, Peter, Michael, and Susan. 

Other birthdays of friends and Facebook contacts I jointly dedicate my song to today include Lorraine Blair from Perth in Western Australia: Angie Boback from America: Heather Walley from Stoke-on-Trent, Steve Artist who lives in Bradford, and close friend, David Green from Mirfield in West Yorkshire. I wish you all the happiest of birthdays and hope that you all enjoy your special day.

There was never one day in my life as a child when I did not hear my mother sing, ‘The Isle of Innisfree’. It was her favourite song. 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 pass by without all the Forde Family watching ‘The Quiet Man’. Both mum and dad loved this film, and so it was only natural that all seven of their children grew to love it also. We still watch it today in memory of our parents. This is for you, mum, and for all the others above who are blessed to share your birthday today.

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Everybody I know loves their mum to bits, and I am no exception to that rule. My mum gave birth to me, and she made me and my six brothers and sister what we are today. She could do no wrong in my eyes. 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 the person who stands alongside them. The mere fact that I have remained a committed Christian ever since my baptism (78 years ago) is due less to any religiosity on my part, and more out of deep respect for my mother’s intrinsic ‘goodness’ as a human being. I cannot possibly conceive of there being no God when good people like mum exist upon the earth in large number, and within reach of everybody. Only a supreme being could have created someone as good, as loving, and as mischievous as my mother. 

Like Hovis brown bread, had you cut mum’s body up slice by slice, you would not have found any badness in it. She was good through and through. Her daily good acts identified her as being a woman filled with love towards her neighbours and Christian charity towards any needy person who crossed her path. She was an instant friend to the stranger and yet, despite all these admirable Christian qualities, mum possessed what some might call a healthy degree of religious scepticism and churchly irreverence; especially toward the parish priest who served Mass every Sunday at ‘Cleckheaton Roman Catholic Church’. 

Mum would deliberately arrive at ‘Cleckheaton Catholic Church’ every week, ten minutes after the priest had started Sunday Mass. Then, after receiving Holy Communion at the altar rail, instead of returning to her pew at the back of the church, she would walk straight outside, where she would be smoking her second cigarette before the rest of the family came out of the church, ten minutes later. We never needed to ask mum why she always arrived late and left church early as she would regularly let it be known to my father whenever he complained about her lack of punctuality. Mum would simply tell my dad, “One hour a week is long enough, Paddy, to listen to you or any Irish priest!” The weekly service would always last 80 minutes, and that is why my mother always cut the priest short by 20 minutes and smoked a few cigarettes outside instead. The twenty minutes less than mum would give the weekly service, my father made up for. He would always be in his end pew (third row from the front LHS) to pray twenty minutes before the priest started Mass. Dad would also attend Mass on church Holy Days (which are obligatory attendance) whereas mum would only ever attend church on a Sunday unless Christmas Day fell midweek. She would attend a Saturday wedding if there was a meal, drinks, and dance reception to follow! 

Mum and dad were opposite in most things. In fact, I cannot imagine how they ever got together in the first place, being so different in personalities. However, they must have had something going for them, and whatever it was, they kept it going for a long time because they parented seven children (of whom I am the oldest). Mum loved dancing but dad, despite displaying clever footwork dribbling and kicking a football around a soccer pitch every weekend in his early twenties (he played football for County Kilkenny, as well as playing for the Irish National Soccer Squad), when it came to dancing, mum said that dad had two left feet. She always complained that he never took her dancing and would only have a drink at Christmas. Mum had always been a chain smoker and she loved a drink. As for dad, his father had been an alcoholic. Dad never smoked, and only drank a token glass of sherry on Christmas Day. Mum’s heavy cigarette smoking irritated him so much that he constantly went around every room in the house opening the windows to clear the air, even in the middle of winter. Mum would shadow him, closing them all again, and calling dad a ‘fresh-air fiend’ in the process, along with a few choice Gaelic swear words I never learned.

There came a time after their seven children had grown and left the parental abode when dad started cutting the church lawn three afternoons weekly. He would peddle his bicycle four miles there and back to do so. He did this voluntary task for over ten years, and because he always declined priestly payment for his labour, my mum used to tell him he did it as a penance for all his wrongdoings. If cutting the church lawn 1500 times is enough to gain dad entrance into heaven, he will be sitting there alongside St. Patrick for sure (he was never English enough to accept St Peter as being God’s right-hand-man in preference to Celtic stock) .As for mum, unless 1500 cigarette cards or 10,000 Green Shield Stamps gained her entry through the Pearly Gates, I know that she will only have agreed to enter heaven, if she was allowed to arrive later than the rest of the party, and could nip outside for a quick fag whenever she wanted one and was entertained by regular dances which provided liberal access to a glass or two of rum and black currant. 

The character traits I can remember most about my mother was her compassion, her charity, her generosity of spirit, her capacity never to hold grudges from one 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 allow one day to pass without telling 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 one and the same, ‘I love you, Billy’. Whenever I complained that we were poor or moaned for want of this or that which household finance 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 mum died, there was no ‘material inheritance’ to bequeath to her children; she had spent it all on bingo, fags, and rum and black currant drinks. Along with dad, our parents did leave the seven of us an inheritance worth more than any amount of money or property. We were endowed with a wealth that can only be found in the dividend of love and family. The inheritance my parents left their seven children was six brothers and sisters, along with the most precious of memories that she loved each of us and told us so daily. By leaving us each other to rely on during times of need, we were never left feeling unloved or unwanted even during our lives after mum and dad died.

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. It is a traditional role in all Irish households that when the firstborn is a female, the girl’s education is usually shortened as she becomes a second helper to her mother in the home and a little mum to all her siblings. My mother’s father had a weak heart that prevented him from doing any manual work, and this increased my mother’s family responsibilities in the parental abode.

My mother was a romantic through and through. She not only dreamed constantly, but she believed in her dreams, and always encouraged me to believe in mine too. Mum never hid her true feelings from my father or any of her family, friends, or neighbours. She was an open book, and whichever page you turned and stopped at, she was not unafraid to tell you what was on her mind. Mum gave an honest expression to her feelings at the moment of their birth, which meant she often acted before thinking. She was always willing to put her true self on parade while being forever resistant to march to the tune of another. Her natural disposition was being a ‘rebel’, a Forde family trait that has been inherited by all seven of her children. Whereas dad would have been concerned with how the neighbours ever saw him, mum didn’t care. She was perfectly happy to always display her natural disposition, even if it meant being prepared to accept any embarrassment in the event of any shortfall. In short, she loved life to the full, and the living of it was far too precious for her to ever let it slip by without her hanging on to its coat tail.

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 where was the special place chosen by her and dad, 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 unfortunately which the public cannot get officially close to anymore. The ‘Metal Man’ stands on one of three pillars near Newtown Cove, Tramore, Waterford and is a maritime beacon constructed through Lloyds of London at the behest of the Admiralty after the tragic loss of 360 lives after HMS Seahorse sank after becoming grounded at Brownstown Head in bad weather in 1816. Being a student of British and Irish History all my life, it pleases me to think that the ‘Metal Man’ assisted my birth into the world, as well as preventing the premature departure of so many seafarers over the past two hundred years.

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

After I had written and had published over fifty books for children, young persons, and adults, I gave up writing books for a few years. 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 I grew up, and after wrapping them in the clothes of Irish myth and a shroud of rustic superstition, I embellished them with a touch of 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’. Portlaw is a sacred place in my heart. It is the Irish village where I was born in the front room of my maternal grandparent’s house, Willie and Mary Fanning.

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 any of these fourteen romantic novels FOR FREE, please access my website: www.fordefables.co.uk
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 ever sang were Vera Lynn’s songs. She would have been extremely proud of her oldest child had she known that I would become good friends with Vera Lynn for thirty years before Dame Vera died. Mum was a wonderful woman, who was also blessed with being beautiful in her prime. And yet, despite her love of singing, mum could not sing for toffee. She could not 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 then making up her own words 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. 

After berating my mother for her poor singing one day, mum taught me one of the most important lessons she ever taught me as a child. Mum said, “Tell me, 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?”  I could not. Then, she added, “And until you can, get out of my way, boyo, because I’ve got lots of work left to do and lots more songs still to sing!” My mother then asked me if I knew why birds sing? I replied, “Because they are birds of course!”. Her smiling reply was, “Because, Billy boy, they have a song to sing!” 

In her reply, my mum was telling me that we all have a 'song to sing’; the song of life, and we each sing our songs in different ways by using whatever talent we possess. Some of us paint, some sculpt, some people write, and some express their talent through dance. My father played football and in later life, he hewed coal from the pit face. Others are stonemasons, and some fashion designers or dressmakers, and some cobble boots and shoes, or weave and tailor cloth. Our greatest talent of all is to love, share with and be a good friend of another! My mother’s song of life involved being a good person in everything she did, 

When I started my daily singing practice over two years ago, 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 to me every day of her life. I sing that same song today in dedication to all birthday celebrants and in memory of a mum whom I dearly loved and have missed every day since her death in 1986. If it was within my power, Mum, I would make the anniversary of your birth a national holiday, like so many good people before you.

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 my ashes spread on home soil. Like my mum, going back to Ireland for me is like going back home. As soon as I see the Irish shoreline, my heart falls back in love with my country we emigrated from when I was a boy of three years old. But it is only when I am travelling the Portlaw road from County Waterford and catch sight of the Bridge that is positioned at the bottom of the village of Portlaw where I was born, do I feel ‘back home’. My spirits rise, and my soul rejoices in restorative excitement as we cross the Bridge, and I instantly feel warm inside. 

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 the poet spent his summers as a child. I will certainly check it out when we next tour Ireland. Love you, Mum, from Billy, Mary, Eileen, Patrick, Peter, Michael, and Susan.

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 23rd January 2021

23/1/2021

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I dedicate my song today to five birthday celebrants. We wish happy birthday to Sam Rubery from Bradford, West Yorkshire: Shannon from Warrington (granddaughter of my good friend, Joseph Newns): Kay Walsh who lives in County Tipperary, Ireland: Peadar MacGinley who lives in Summerhill, Meath, Ireland: Mairead Brophy who originates from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, but who now lives in Fiddown, Kilkenny, Ireland. Enjoy your special day, Sam, Shannon, Kay, Peadar, and Mairead. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

Today, I  am going to give you a double treat. I will sing two different songs with the same title called “I’m Sorry’. Both songs were originally recorded by favourite singers of mine, John Denver, and Brenda Lee. We were all born around the same time. I was born in 1942, John Denver was born in 1943, and Brenda Lee was born in 1944.

John Denver’s song “I’m Sorry” reached the Number 1 spot in the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart on September 27th, 1975. The song is an apology for forsaken love. Brenda Lee’s song entitled, “I’m Sorry” was a 1960 hit song when she was a 15-year-old American singer. It peaked at Number 1 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ singles chart in July 1960.

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I will never forget my mother telling me when I was a young boy, “Billy, never be too proud to say ‘sorry’ when you have done something wrong.” I also recollect my mother telling me, “Never think that saying ‘sorry’ is a weakness, Billy. It takes courage to apologise!” In my life, I have remembered this motherly advice and have never found apologising to be either difficult or embarrassing. 

It is interesting to observe that had it fallen to my father to convey this advice to me, it would never have happened. Dad held only one view where apologising was concerned, and that came straight off the cinema screen from the mouth of film star John Wayne, who was dad’s favourite movie star and screen idol, “Never apologise. It’s a sign of weakness!”. The only person my father ever said ‘sorry’ to in his entire life would have been God when he attended weekly confession at church, and though he will have been sincere in his confessional apology, his words will not have been voiced without a convenient mumble. 

If there was only one person to blame about my father’s reluctance/refusal to apologise, the blame must surely be placed at the door of John Wayne. To say that dad was such a serious man in virtually everything he undertook, watching the character of his favourite male film star John Wayne on the screen must have been his fantasy ‘time out’. John Wayne always played the role of the cowboy knight in shining armour, the hero who always came to the defence of a woman being manhandled by some brute. Other character roles played by John Wayne would witness dad’s film idol being the saviour of the small guy who is being laughed at and pushed around in public by the town bully, before stepping in and giving the big bully his comeuppance!  Then there was the American army hero character who John Wayne always played in war films. This was the soldier who would disregard showers of enemy fire to go back into enemy territory to save a wounded comrade. This brave fete was never accomplished without the John Wayne character blowing up a tank blocking his path with a perfectly placed grenade, throwing the wounded soldier over his broad shoulders, and killing forty of the enemy single-handedly while ducking and diving between gunfire and cannon shells as he carried his wounded comrade back across the line to safety. 

My father saw every film that John Wayne ever starred in. He would learn his lines verbatim, and to the chagrin of my mother, he would repeat them to her at the appropriate moment of a marital tiff, as though the words had never been spoken by any other person except my father. Without a shadow of a doubt, John Wayne was dad’s alter ego.

His most oft-repeated lines to my mother which he had stolen from the mouth of John Wayne came from the Irish film ‘The Quiet Man’. Whenever dad came through the door after his hard shift at the pit had ended, he would say to mum in his most commanding tone of voice, “Get the tae on, Woman, the man of the house has come home! (tae is Irish for tea). If ever any of his children told my father that they had come second in anything they did, instead of receiving the usual fatherly compliment, dad would repeat another of John Wayne’s put-down lines, as he reminded us, “The first is first, and the second is nobody!” ( a line from the film ‘Custer’s Last Stand’). However, his favourite line of all that came from the lips of a John Wayne film character was “Never apologise. It’s a sign of weakness!” I cannot remember which film that saying came from. If I ever knew, I probably forgot it on purpose! 

Like many men, my father was a paradox. He was the proudest of men and yet the most modest person I ever knew. While a false sense of pride no doubt prevented my father from apologising, he was a most respected man in the community whose behaviour outside the family home would never result in anything being said or done by him that would warrant an apology.  Being very independent and self-resilient, my father would never ask anyone to do anything he would not do or could not do. He was popular with his workmates, considered to be an industrious and diligent worker by his employers, and a person who would ‘have your back’ before ‘go behind it’. Very few people in his life will have ever really got close enough to him to know him, except my mother and his brother Billy, from whom he was inseparable. Dad was a man who did not converse easily with strangers. He had no need to impress others to feel good enough about himself.

The only thing I could never quite weigh up about my mother and father was how two people with seemingly opposite personalities could ever hit it off, or have anything in common? Like most of us, my father was a different person at different times of the day. My mother would tell me that my dad had a hat for every occasion and a different face for every day of the week. Dad was not like my mother. Mum never put on any false airs and graces and was always as one found her, whereas my father was a more complicated person in every sense. 

I recall seeing a mystery film as a young teenager called ‘The Three Faces of Eve’ (1957). It was about a woman who had a ‘dissociative identity disorder’. That film gave me the initial notion that we all have many different sides to our character which we publicly display, parade, and use to disguise and hide the real ‘us’. There were four sides of my father that I knew of. 

There was Paddy Forde, the miner who commanded the respect of all his workmates for being a man of honesty and integrity. Then, there was Mr Forde who the neighbours saw and thought they knew. He was a perfect gentleman and the husband of Maureen Forde, and father of their large family and a good provider for them. Then, there was Dad Forde, a parent of strictness, stubbornness, strength, resolute conviction, religiosity, and a man who would never change his mind once he had made it! 

Then, there was Paddy Forde, the loner who knew everybody but who preferred his own company when not with his brother Billy (after whom I was named). This was the man in his early twenties who courted my mother when she was an 18-year-old colleen called Maureen Fanning from Portlaw. He was the budding footballer who played soccer for County Kilkenny where he lived, and who also went on to play in the Irish national squad. A young man with little money to his name, he would cycle 33 miles on an old bike as often as he could, at least twice every week from County Kilkenny to meet up with my mum secretly behind ‘The Metal Man’ in Tramore, Waterford, before cycling back 33 miles in the dark after walking mum back home the 12 miles to Portlaw where she lived. Whatever mum and dad had going for them during their Irish courting days, they kept it going for many more years and it stayed with them, at least until after they had parented seven children.

Indeed, as I once remarked to my youngest brother, Michael (the second youngest of seven siblings), although we had the same mother and father, we never experienced the same parents! I told my brother Michael that in my youth, I still recall mum and dad walking four of us across the fields during the summer months. Partway on our walk, we would stop for a short break, and while mum and dad would lay down in the long grass, we would be told to run off and play among ourselves for ten minutes. Mum’s three eldest children (myself, Mary, and Eileen) grew up during the years when my mum and dad loved each other to bits. By the time my brothers Patrick and Peter arrived on the scene, I guess there were as many ‘keep-to-yourself’ days between mum and dad as there were ‘give-us-a-cuddle’ days. However, by the time that my two youngest siblings, Michael and Susan came along, mum and dad had gradually grown physically apart. Had a stranger witnessed the different experiences we seven children/siblings had growing up in the ‘Forde Home’ between 1942-62, he would have concluded that we had been born to different parents at different times and had grown up in different households!  My two youngest siblings never experienced the same happy upbringing that myself and the next two oldest siblings enjoyed.

By the time that the two youngest children were born and arrived on the family scene, mum and dad had ‘loved each other out’. Unlike the romantic tangles, our parents would frequently encounter when they kissed and cuddled in the long grass of my youth as we went on Sunday afternoon walks across the meadows, mum, and dad had now entered the fallow stage of their marital union. This is the period in all life-long marriages when times of harvests become rarer for a man and his wife and fewer seeds are sown during the more romantic months of spring and autumn.

During my discussion with my youngest brother about our different experiences, I reminded my brother Michael of the cruel timing of being born at the tail end of an old dog’s wag. He and his younger sister grew up unfortunately at a time when mum and dad were growing apart and were also growing less tolerant towards the worse sides of each other’s character. This is the decade that all life-long marriages go through, where the ‘lovemaking’ between husband and wife stops and is exchanged with increased rows, lots more shouting across the room at each other, and the occasional flying plate being thrown before shattering in pieces against a nearby wall (that needed wallpapering again anyway!)  

After my parent’s seven children had grown into adults and left home to establish and live out our own lives, as so often happens in lengthy marriages, the man and wife start to remember what it was about their spouse which first attracted them to each other in the first place; during their days of wild courtship and sweet romance. While they never return to those heady days of wild physicality with each other, they do find themselves starting to like each other more easily and holding hands as they walk out in public side-by-side becomes a more natural thing to do. They even find their mutual tolerance level increasing. The raising of voices in anger becomes a thing of the past, never more to return. Their newest and strangest discovery of all is a welcomed and reassuring friendship that develops in their relationship; something they never previously knew or would have ever believed possible. 

When the first parent dies, all the children rally around the remaining parent, and love them to death, until they also pass away. Angry words and bad sentiments are never again voiced between parent and child, and even the siblings end a lifetime of squabbling as disagreements between brother and sister no longer come into play. The family becomes as closely knit a unit as any family can become without being thought incestuous, and each member is prepared to go to any length to protect the family name, their siblings and bereaved parent.

In a strange way, the remaining family learn that actions speak louder than words where love needs to be shown. It is as though all remaining family members have learned how to say “I’m sorry’ for any past wrongs they may have done by means of their kind and considered actions toward each other without there being any need to vocalise those apologetic words. 

Love and peace 
Bill xxx 

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Song For Today: 22nd January 2021

22/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace 
Bill xxx 

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Song For Today: 21st January 2021

21/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace. 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 20th January 2021

20/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 19th January 2021

19/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 18th January 2021

18/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 17th January 2021

17/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 16th January 2021

16/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 15th January 2021

15/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace 
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 14th January 2021

14/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace
​Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 13th January 2021

13/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace 

Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 12th January 2021

12/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace
​Bill xxx 

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Song For Today: 9th January 2021

9/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 7th January 2021

7/1/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace. Bill xxx

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