FordeFables
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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
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        • 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 March 2021

31/3/2021

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Good morning Carrick-on-Suir. Irishman, William Forde here with your daily song. Have a nice day.

I dedicate my song today to my brother-in-law, John Gautry, who has been married to my sister Eileen for over sixty years. They married when she was a mere sixteen when I was living in Canada for a few years. John is around my age and has worked hard for his family of three lovely daughters to give them all a good start in life. He has also worked hard to keep my sister in airfares, flying across to Jersey every month to see her oldest daughter and her family. Enjoy your special day, John. Billy and Sheila xx

I also wish a happy birthday to my great-nephew, Reubin. who is the son of my niece, Evie, who lives in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Enjoy your special day, Reubin, and I hope you like the car I sent you. Love Great Uncle Billy and Sheila xx
We also wish a happy birthday to three Facebook friends. Happy birthday to Pat Meade who lives in Ogonnelloe, County Clare in Ireland: Michelle Curran who lives in Borehamwood, Southern Hertfordshire, England: Peggy Phillips who lives in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England. Pat, Michelle, and Peggy enjoy your special day. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Reflections of My Life’ by the Scottish band, Marmalade. This was a hit single in 1959/60. The song was successful worldwide, reaching Number 3 in the UK in 1969, Number 10 in the US in 1970 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart, and Number 7 on the ‘Cash Box Top 100’. The group was presented with a gold disc for global sales. In 1998 the writers were awarded a ‘Special Citation of Achievement’ by the BMI for attaining radio broadcast performances in excess of one million in the US alone.

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During the past three years since I have been engaged in my daily singing practice to improve my lung capacity and oxygenation levels, accompanying each recorded song of mine on my Facebook page daily has been words that indicate how the song I sing that day has reflected on my life. Such reflections have taken me back to my childhood years, when, as an Irish family we emigrated to seek a better life across the Irish Sea in West Yorkshire, England. The songs I have sung over the past three years have varied far and wide, and have reflected songs of my grandparents, songs of my uncles, songs of my parents, songs of my own youth, and also of my siblings.

My songs sung have reminded me of every stage of my life so far. They have reminded me of every job I ever undertook, whether as a mill hand at the age of 15 years, or a professional singer for a few months in Canada at the age of 21 years, or as a mill manager at the age of 25 years, or as a probation officer at the age of thirty, as a published author at the age of 47 years, or as a person living with three different body cancers for most of my 70s. The songs also remind me of the many good and famous people who I have been fortunate to know, and the thousands of people who have offered up their prayers for me, and who have lit their candles for my improvement in health, and have paid for masses to be said on my behalf, all across the globe. This latter group are Facebook friends who I have never met face-to-face, and never will for the most part, but they are people who have walked with me along my journey of pain and ill-health over the past decade. They are people who have taken me to their heart and given this stranger their unqualified love. They have made me feel much wanted to have felt so loved and well thought about, and I am blessed to call them 'friends'. I thank them all graciously.

The songs I sing also reminded me of my marriage to Sheila on my 70th birthday in November 2012. I was married in the autumn of my life to a beautiful widow who was 14 years younger than me, and who made my life complete. Finally, the songs I sing remind me just how close mankind is to one another. Each day I sing a song, someone on one of the twenty Facebook sites I post on in England and Ireland reminds me of ‘the reflections of their life’ that my song has evoked for them, and they thank me most graciously. They tell me in their dozens what a particular song has meant to them, and the happy memories that the song brought back to them.

Songs and singing, and all form of music is both the food of love and the food of life. I cannot imagine what life would be like without a song in my heart or a tune in my head, or to be devoid of the memory (happy or sad) which the song or piece of music stirred inside me. My mother would sing all day long as she worked in our home to care for her seven children. She could not string two notes together which were ever meant to be partnered. and would never remember the correct words of the song she sang, but none of that affected her ability to be happy whenever she sang. What words she did not know, she simply made up, and as to anyone nearby who considered her singing to be more of a squawk than a warble, she would simply flap her wings and carry on regardless doing her washing, ironing, darning, cooking, and scrubbing the floors. Only the rich and famous had carpets in those days; the poor either had bare flags or if they were able to afford, lino.

I once my mother disparagingly that she could not sing for toffee, to which she replied, “So what? Where is it written or said that only good singers are allowed to sing a song?” She then revealed her earthly wisdom that had been born of pragmatism when she asked me if I knew why birds sing, even the ones that squawk their sound instead of warble it melodically? Her answer was, “Birds sing, Billy Forde because they have a song to sing!”

My mother, who often spoke about ‘the song of life’, was effectively telling me that we all have a special talent; a ’song of life' that we each express in our different ways. Some fashion their song of life into the clothes they design, or like my mining father, they hack theirs from the coal face. Some write, some paint, some sculpt, carve wood, chisel stone or sweep factory floors. My mother believed that we should all discover what our talent was and how best to share our talent with others. She reminded me that we each had a 'song of life' to sing, and should do so. When I asked her “Why?” she simply replied, “Because we can!”

Consider for a moment. Do you sing your 'song of life', or do you go through your life scared to come out and use your special talent as the good person you truly are meant to be? We all do something well. We can all significantly add to the life, security, pleasure, or satisfaction of another by giving them a bit more of ourselves. Who knows what tune your song of life plays? Your talent may be a constant smile on your face that has the capacity to cheer up the faces of others who are fed up or depressed? Your talent may be a listening ear, a comforting presence, the way you shake hands warmly upon renewing an old friendship, or simply conveying to a friend that you are there for them in the event of ever being needed. Your talent may be how much friendship and consideration you are prepared to extend to the stranger in the street who asks for our help.

Paradoxically, it can also include you allowing other kind people who like doing things for others, to do things for you occasionally. Your mere acceptance of their help can provide them with a worthwhile purpose to their day. So always think twice before you refuse to accept the offer of somebody else’s help as you may be denying them their first chance that day to be kind to another.

So, if you read this post from start to end today, reflect on what your special human talent and ‘song of life ‘might be. You never know, it might even turn out to be life itself, and the living of it to its fullest?

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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MEDICAL UPDATE OF MY CONDITION: 30th MARCH 2021

30/3/2021

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Thank you all for your public and private messages of goodwill for my participation in the new trial drug. I attended my first session yesterday at Leeds Hospital, which went okay. It could not have come soon enough for me, as my pain has worsened considerably over the past month and I spent most of last Saturday in more pain than I have known since my accident as an 11-year-old child when a wagon knocked me down and ran over me. Cancer in my face, neck, and throat is advancing at a rapid rate, and new cancer lumps appear daily now.

The nurse in charge of the Day Ward yesterday, prescribed me some morphine to take at home when the pain next gets too bad. It is ironic, but before my cancers started in early 2013, I had never taken a pain killer since the age of twelve years, and before I had two heart attacks in the same week when I was 60 years old, I refused to take even an aspirin. Last night when I went to bed, the pain was very bad and I took the morphine shot. It alleviated the pain initially but it came back with a vengeance an hour later. However strange it may sound to any non-Christian, I find that prayer is just as helpful as is the strongest paracetamol or even morphine dose.

What has been a Godsend to me over many years of illness, is my daily routine, which unfortunately my increased pain level has interrupted more of late. I always remember my dear friend Etta tell me how important to one's sense of good health and wellbeing it is to have a daily routine. She lived to the old age of 94 years and was so right in her observation on the merits of a routine. For years now, my daily routine and some relaxation techniques have acted as a significant help in distracting my conscious mind away from my body pain.

However, I have noticed during the past two weeks that my morning routine is now taking me twice as long to complete as I have to constantly relax back in my armchair and close my eyes until the pain has been and gone again. Each morning I put my singing post up on eight English sites and fourteen Irish sites that have followed my words and songs for many years now. What once took me two hours on average every morning, now takes me all morning.

So, if any of you message me, and I do not or have not replied to you, please understand that I do read your message sometime during the day, even if I have not had the chance to properly respond to you. I have a few dozen Facebook contacts who are also in terminal stages of their different cancers who keep in regular contact with me and I prioritise them. It is surprising how many people keep their illness to themselves! So many people who are dying are naturally fearful of facing their end, and more people than you could imagine keep quiet about their pain, and remain silent in their struggle or their loneliness (as not all people fighting cancer are blessed to have a loving spouse by their side as I do in Sheila).

My message today is to say 'thank you' for your continued prayers and support, and to explain if I do not always respond to your messages with any more than a kiss. I also want to say to all people struggling with cancer out there that not only is it okay to share your pain but it is wise to do so. It is so satisfying to feel the tangible love of another person whom you have never met come your way. It is so remarkable to know that there are many others who want to, and who are willing to share your painful journey with you. No person in any struggle anywhere or anytime ever needs to walk their last road alone. All one has to do is to show themselves willing, and to stretch out their hand in friendship, to feel the hand of another return the loving gesture.

Finally, I experienced a remarkable coincidence yesterday at St. James' Hospital in Leeds. I was in a small ward that held four patients, two receiving chemotherapy, and two receiving Cancer Immunotherapy. There have only been five people selected for this new and expensive drug trial in Leeds over the past two years since it started. I was the fifth person. The person in the opposite chair to me was one of 'The Famous Five' in the drug trial I am on. He is a few years older than me and has been taking the drug every three weeks for the past ten months. I do not know his circumstances but I would like to think that our meeting was much more than a coincidence?

Love and peace
​Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 30th March 2021

30/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to two birthday celebrants. We wish a happy birthday to Sue Kelly who originates from Kildare and now lives in Dublin. Ireland. We also wish a happy birthday to Breda Kirby who originates from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland, and still resides in County Tipperary. Enjoy your special day, ladies, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘If You Ever Change Your Mind’. This song was written by Parker McGee and Bob Gundry. It was recorded by the American country music artist, Crystal Gayle. It was released in August 1980. The song was Gayle’s eighth Number I hit. The single spent a total of 18 weeks in the charts. It also peaked at Number 18 on the ‘Adult Contemporary’ chart.

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George Bernard Shaw said, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” My father was a very principled, proud, yet stubborn man and once he had made his mind up, he never changed it, even when he was wrong. Unlike dad, I have always been too pragmatic a person to get stuck down a hole I had dug for myself without wanting to escape at the first opportunity. Whenever the facts changed, I have always been prepared to change my mind, so I suppose I would never have made an MP.

As a lifelong advocate and disciple of ‘Behaviourism’, I know how powerful human thought is in governing the way we do and the things we do. We think, feel, and do in sequence, and it is this combination that determines our belief patterns, shapes our emotional experiences, and quantifies the things we do. What one thinks truly matters. Think rubbish and we are most likely to feel rubbish and talk rubbish! Think positively, and we shall automatically feel positive and most likely act positively. The same is true in the sequential form if we think negatively. Begin with a negative thought and we shall automatically feel negative consequentially and will therefore more probably act in a negative way! Such is the power of one thought. A commonly held thought has always been more powerful than the combined word of many. Most protests peter out but commonly held thoughts can start a revolution!

The greatest revolution of our generation can be witnessed in the human capacity to bring about change. We have learned that by changing the inner attitudes of our minds, we can change the outer aspects of life; the lives of ourselves and others. Whatever outer problems any human faces, they will change their circumstances for the better far more easily by working from the inside out instead of trying to change from the outside in. If there is any aspect of our outer life that we want rid of, then far easier to change how one thinks and feels about it (so its presence no longer bothers one in the same way), than to struggle and strive to physically remove it from one’s presence. Once we remove something from our trend of thought, the associated feelings attached are also removed from our emotional output. The undesired thing one initially wanted out of our life, no longer possesses the means to adversely affect our lives, even when it remains in it.

There are too many people in the world today who overconcern themselves about the thoughts and opinions of others. It is as though we are never satisfied until we convert their beliefs to ours and persuade them that our way is the best way to be. I decided long ago that while I might be influenced by the thoughts of others, I would never have my life controlled by the thoughts of others. My own peace of mind essentially came from being content to mind my own business, and not wanting to meddle in the lives of others, unless they asked for my help. Probably, the greatest discovery in my life was when I accepted that changing our thoughts can change our experience significantly, just like shaking a kaleidoscope can give us a new outcome and make the world look different.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 29th March 2021

29/3/2021

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I dedicate today’s song to five birthday celebrants. I wish a happy birthday to my nephew Michael Forde who lives in Birstall, Batley with his wife and children. Michael is the son of my youngest brother Michael and his mother Denise. Enjoy your special day, Michael, and love from all the Forde family. Uncle Billy and Sheila xx

We also extend birthday greetings to three Facebook friends who celebrate their birthdays today. They are Desmond Christopher Mullins who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Mary O Regan who was born in the village where I was born, in Portlaw County Waterford, but who now lives in Dublin, Ireland, and Sonya Scott who lives in the village where I now live, Haworth, West Yorkshire. Enjoy your special day Desmond, Mary, and Sonya, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Come Together’. This is a song by the English rock band the Beatles and was written by John Lennon, and credited to Lennon-McCartney. The song is the opening track on their 1969 album ‘Abbey Road’. The song reached the top of the charts in the United States and peaked at Number 4 in the United Kingdom.

‘John Lennon was initially inspired to write Come Together’ after a request from Timothy Leary. Leary wanted him to write a song for his campaign for Governor of California’ against Ronald Reagan. Leary’s campaign promptly ended when Leary was sent to prison for possession of marijuana. John Lennon recalled: “The thing was created in the studio. It's gobbledygook. ‘Come Together’ was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn't come up with one. But I came up with this, ‘Come Together’, which would have been no good to him. You couldn't have a campaign song like that, right?”

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One of the most common phrases designed to appeal to unification factors in any community, country, or organisation is the plea to ‘Come Together’. We have recently witnessed such political pleas over Brexit, and more recently, over the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and the restrictions that the country has faced since March 2020. However much our politicians perennially make pleas for the electorate to ‘Come Together’ on this or that, when push comes to shove, our governing bodies always have vested interests to protect.

Whatever their political colours or your political persuasions happen to be, democracy works more effectively in a free society when one's opposition is open instead of being a combination of mutually interested parties pursuing their own covert ends. Democracy can only work when it is transparent to all, and it is seen to exist in even distribution and access. Democracy carries with it the right to peacefully protest in public and to be able to appropriately express one’s honest view without fear or favour. Democracy demands the individual’s right to discriminate between what one believes to be right and wrong morally. Democracy demands the right of the individual to become a collective body, and for a collective body to accommodate individual and minority views/ interests within it.

When humans come together, the world can advance at an unbelievable pace. Take the little time that the scientists from many nations took to come up with several viable vaccines to contain the Covid-19 virus (less than one year) when previously, a new vaccine would have taken up to ten years to produce. Yet, instead of the whole world ‘staying together’ and building upon the power of co-operation instead of national competition so that we can eradicate this disease and all its variants globally as soon as possible, we already see national factions in European countries moving farther apart from Great Britain once more. What for, one might ask? For nothing more than saving face within their own communities! Even the political vanity of power-crazed European politicians facing an election soon is prepared to save face before saving real lives!

Shall we ever learn that we can achieve more together in a common purpose than will ever be possible in the national division?

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 28th March 2021

28/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to four people who celebrate their birthdays today. First, we wish a happy birthday to Diane Howard who lives in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Diane and her husband are old rock and roll friends with whom we would sit and dance weekly at the ‘Batley Rock and Roll Club’. Sheila and Diane became instant friends after each displayed a love of all breed of dogs. We also wish a happy birthday to our Italian friend, Giusy Lazzaretti, who lives in Rome, Italy. When Sheila and I toured Europe for a month in 2018, we lodged with Guisy and her husband for half a week and became such good friends in such a short time. The year later, Guisy came across to stay at our home in Haworth as our guest. Guisy treasures peace and quiet. She found walking around Haworth and its moorlands enchanting. She also worked hard alongside Sheila and me in our allotment, laying flagstones. I am sure she will one day return to us and to see the fruits of her labour of love in our allotment. We also wish a happy birthday to my Facebook friend Marcella Sullivan who originates from County Tipperary but who now lives in Woking, Surrey, England. Finally, birthday greetings are sent to Jean Casey who lives in Farnborough, Hampshire, England. Have a smashing birthday, Diane, Giusy, Marcella, and Jean.

My song today is ‘The Black Velvet Band’. This is a traditional folk song which was reportedly collected from singers in Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, and the United State. The words of the song describe how a young man is tricked and then sentenced to transportation to Australia, a common punishment in the British Empire during the 19th century. There have been several versions of this song recorded; perhaps the most popular (at least by all Irish listeners) by ‘The Dubliners’ in 1967. Their song was based on a version sung by the traditional English singer Harry Cox. The narrator is a bound apprentice in a town (which varies in different versions).

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The song speaks to the worse side of human nature, whereby someone gains the affections of another who has feelings for them, before reverting to the practice of blaming the innocent party for something they never did, by allowing them to take the rap for some illegal act, to save one’s own skin.

On too many occasions during my 27-year career as a Probation Officer in West Yorkshire, I came to know of people getting sentenced for offences they never committed. The act of being framed always stinks, but more so when the person being set up is known by the person setting them up.

I am reasonably sure that the person I speak of today will have passed away now, but he was a detective in the police force whose wife/ partner worked in a service related to the Probation/Social Services/Caring Profession. I knew the wife of the detective but had only seen her husband in passing. One day while on duty at one of the county’s Crown Courts, I was sitting inside the court listening to the police officer’s testimony being placed before the sitting judge for his examination. I became more interested when I realised that the detective officer giving his account of the defendant’s arrest was the partner of my friend. I did not know him personally, but I had heard on the grapevine that he was certainly the type of police detective who would be tempted to manufacture evidence (even on sworn oath) to obtain a conviction if he believed the defendant as being guilty of what he was being charged with but could not prove it legitimately.

The detective was a police dog handler of a large German Alsatian breed used for tracking the scent of illegal drugs. The defendant in the trial had been charged with possession of drugs with a view of selling. He claimed that the drugs had been planted by the detective or his police colleague when they inspected his property. He also claimed that when he refused to be arrested, the detective had picked up his huge Alsatian in his hands and threw the dog towards the defendant’s face. Naturally, the detective denied each of the defendant’s claims as being preposterous.

The upshot was that nobody in the courtroom (including the judge), believed that any arresting officer would throw a huge Alsatian at a suspect, even were he able to physically pick up such a big dog? As both accounts of what really happened were significantly different, either the arresting detective or the defendant was telling an untruth. After the judge concluded that the dog-throwing incident was clearly untrue then the drug planting accusation by the defendant was also perceived ‘on probability’ of also being untrue. The defendant (who had previous convictions for drug use and supply) received two year’s imprisonment as his sentence. Had he and the police detective not had a bad history between them, the alleged drug planting and dog throwing incidents might never have taken place. This was the early 1970s and Crown Court Judges always believed the evidence put forward by the arresting police officer, especially when it conflicted with the defendant’s account of events. It was not uncommon for many a defendant to claim that they had been ‘fitted up’ by the cops. Neither was it uncommon for a defendant who had been arrested over the weekend, to be produced before the Magistrate’s Court on a Monday morning with bruises to the face and torso or wearing a black eye, having spent a weekend in the police cells.
How do I know that the detective in question fitted the defendant up by planting drugs at his home when arresting him, and then physically throwing his large dog at him? About six years later, his wife divorced her husband for physical and mental cruelty, and she told three or four of us after her decree absolute some of the lengths her ex-partner had been prepared to go to obtain a conviction. She even recalled one incident when she said the case revolved around his account of events or the account of the accused, and so he did something so preposterous, that cast instant doubt in the judge’s mind that the defendant was the one committing perjury, and not the police detective; he threw his dog at the accused!

He knew that nobody would believe the probability of such a story being true and that sheer scepticism would cast doubt on the remainder of the defendant’s testimony. I was the only person of the four of us (apart from the detective’s wife) who had any specific knowledge of the defendant in question. I never knew for sure if the arresting detective or his police buddy had planted an amount of drugs on the defendant’s property or had legitimately found the drugs in a proper search, but given what the detective’s ex-wife told us, I had no doubt that the dog-throwing incident had been a clever rouse to discredit the defendant’s total account of events.

Love and peace
​Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 27th March 2021

27/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to the memory of my dear father, Harry Patrick Forde (known as Paddy) who died thirty years ago on the 27th, March 1991. The month of March was the month of my father’s birth as well as the month of his death. He was aged 75 years. I can never sing this song without welling up in tears.

Today, we also wish a happy birthday to three Facebook friends of mine who are celebrating their birthday. We wish a happy birthday to Nick Kirby who lives in Lafayette, Tennessee, USA: Olive Kenneally, and Rory Comer who live in Carlow, Ireland. I hope that you all enjoy your special day and Nick, Olive and Rory, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

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For most of his life (apart from the years he played soccer for the County of Kilkenny, as well as for the first and second Irish national team squads), my dad worked as a miner or an industrial engineering labourer. The father of seven children (of whom I am the oldest), my father was a non-smoking, non-drinking, man of industrious character. He was strict, stubborn, principled, religious, and modest in the extreme. He was a proud man whose word was his bond, which once given, it would never be broken. He was a loving husband to my mother and a good father to his seven children. Dad always saw his prime role as being the sole provider for his wife and children. He lived a hard and honourable life, as did my mother, and because they were so different in character, I do not know how they ever clicked in the first place, but whatever they had going on between them, it stayed with them until they had parented seven children together.

My song today is ‘Some Enchanted Evening’. Some Enchanted Evening’ is from Rogers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical ‘South Pacific’. This is the song that I sing today in memory of the anniversary of dad’s death. It is not surprising that dad loved this song as it has long been regarded as being ‘the single biggest popular hit to come out of any Rodgers and Hammerstein show.’ It is a three-verse solo for the leading male character, Emile, in which he describes seeing a stranger, knowing that he will see her again, and dreaming of her laughter. He sings that when you find your ‘true love’, you must ‘fly to her side and make her your own’.

Please forgive me, but I can never sing this song without literally crying, as it is the song with which I most associate my deceased father (along with Sweet Sixteen) more than any other song. Today is the anniversary of my dear father’s death, Harry Patrick Forde (known as Paddy Forde), who died thirty years ago.

Like my dear mother, every sweat that dropped from my father’s brow from his first day of parenthood had been born in a hard upbringing. His prime effort always remained directed towards putting food on the family table, clothes on the backs of his children, and shoes on their feet. In all traditional ways of the times, my father was the head of the household while my mother was the heart of our home. My parents proudly provided all their children with a code of behaviour and a set of values that stood us in good stead ever since. I have previously written much about my dear father and will merely add these extra comments for the purpose of today’s post. Dad was among the strongest of personalities I ever knew, and to use a good old Irish analogy, he was of his generation’s best crop. He believed fervently in an individual ‘doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage’. He viewed the sweat of a man’s brow and his industrious nature as representing the backbone to their character and the spine of their individual worth.

Dad had two favourite songs which he often sang quietly while bathing the miner’s dust off his body when he returned home at the end of his miner’s shift at the local colliery. His collier’s face always fascinated me. He could wash, bathe and scrub for an hour until I imagined his skin would bleed, and there would still be coal dust hiding in his body crevices and skin pores between the last wash and the next. Years of gradual build-up of black coal dust provides a permanent black-glaze-like undercoat to the skin foundation of every miner in the land. This shiny facial look designates any man carrying these distinctive features as once having worked at the pit coalface. It is like a white man giving you a black smile, an image of racial harmony that I find so endearing as being born in the gratitude of life itself.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 26th March 2021

26/3/2021

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I dedicate today’s song to two Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish a happy birthday to Mary Crowther who lives in Lafayette, Pennsylvania, USA. We also wish a happy birthday to Margaret Stynes who lives in Carlow, Ireland. Margaret will find this year’s birthday more emotionally difficult as it will be the first birthday she has experienced since the passing of her mother.

My song today is ‘Ring of Fire’. The song was written by June Carter Cash and Merle Kilgore. It was recorded by the Carter family in 1962 and by Johnnie Cash in 1963. The song was originally recorded by June Carter’s sister, Anita Carter, and was ranked as Number 4 on CMT’S ‘100 Greatest Songs of Country Music’ in 2003 and was Number 87 on the Rolling Stone’s list of ‘The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time’. In June 2014, Rolling Stone ranked the song Number 27 on its list of ‘The 100 Greatest Country Songs of All Time’. The song was recorded on March 25,1963 and became one of the biggest hits of Cash's career, staying at number one on the country chart for seven weeks. It was certified Gold on January 21, 2010, by the RIAA and has also sold over 1.2 million digital downloads.

Although "Ring of Fire" sounds ominous, the term refers to ‘falling in love’; which is what June Carter was experiencing with Johnny Cash at the time.

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I am less of a believer in coincidences, and more of a disciple in micro/macro reproductive systems. I cannot consider it merely ‘coincidental’ that the rotation and cycles of the earth, moon, and all the planets directly affect all human life, without there being an indisputable link between the Creation and Life on Earth. There are patterns in the galactic system that are replicated on the earth below. There is an invisible connection that enjoins nature with nurture, and which harbours meaning to all life on earth and in space.

Geographically, ‘The Ring of Fire’ is a major area in the basin of the Pacific Ocean where many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur. In a large 40,000 km (25,000 miles) horseshoe shape, it is associated with a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs, and volcanic belts, and plate movements. It has 452 volcanoes (more than 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes). It is said that about 90% of all major volcanoes in the world are here. ‘The Ring of Fire’ is sometimes called the circum-Pacific Belt.

I could stretch my writer’s imagination and see a relationship between the horseshoe-shape of ‘The Ring of Fire’ and the shape of the female reproductive organs. I could also make an intergalactic connection between the birth of the stars in the heavens and the birth of every new-born babe on earth. What is harder to explain, however, is the stars in the lovestruck eyes of a man and woman ‘on fire’ with the overwhelming passion and temptation of the flesh to consume all. Wherever lives the ‘Ring of Fire’ in mankind, it shall undoubtedly remain all-consuming.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 25th March 2021

25/3/2021

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Good morning, Haworth Village. Haworth resident, William Forde, here with your daily song. Have a nice day.

I dedicate my song to four people who celebrate their birthday today; two of them very close friends and two Facebook friends. First, I wish a happy birthday to my best friend and allotment buddy, Brian Moorehouse. Brian has been a great help to me and the best of friends since I married Sheila and have lived in Haworth. Next, I wish a happy birthday to my Singapore friend Chand Mantani. Chand and I became Facebook friends for many years and she travelled thousands of miles from Singapore to my home in Haworth to visit me several years ago. I also wish a happy birthday to Facebook friends Mary Duggan who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland, and Jane Farrell who lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. We hope that you all enjoy your special day, and thank you all for your friendship.

My song today is ‘Dream a Little Dream’. This is a 1931 song with music by Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt. The lyrics are by Gus Kahn. It was first recorded in February 1931 by Ozzie Nelson. A popular standard, it has seen more than 60 other versions recorded of the song. One of the highest chart ratings was by ‘The Mamas & The Papas’ in 1968 with Cass Elliot on lead vocals.

Other versions of the song have been performed by many notable singers like Frankie Laine: Ella Fitzgerald: Lois Armstrong: Nat King Cole: Dean Martin and Doris Day.

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There have been many a man and woman I have come across in my life who may not have ever considered themselves being a ‘dreamer’ whenever they slept at night, but once they met the person with whom they instantly fell in love, strange things started to happen to them on a night when they closed their eyes in bed. All you people out there who have ever been madly in love will know immediately what I mean, and I will not need to spell it out, whereas all those readers who have never been in love but who dearly yearned to be, will also be acquainted with the romantic and passionate dream sequence I allude to. Dreamers of their Mr. or Mrs Right will have either placed an imagined face on the body they desire or may have borrowed a face from a past love who they regretfully let go or lost, or perhaps imagined a face of a lover they have yet to meet.

My dear late mother was an eternal dreamer. Her dreams started and never ended. When we were growing up in West Yorkshire, my mum had but one dream; to own a country cottage dwelling with roses around its front porch, and a donkey eating the grass outback. But being married to a miner, and the mother of seven children (of whom I was the oldest), the most she ever aspired to was a rented council house on a West Yorkshire estate.

Each Sunday when we walked the road to Mass in Cleckheaton or during a mid-week when we walked the road to see a film at the Cleckheaton Picture House (cinema to all you under 50), we would pass my mother’s dream cottage. The cottage was situated halfway down ‘New Road’. Prior to the ‘Second World War’ awfully expensive houses started to be built down both sides of the ‘New Road’ and continued to be built when the war had ended. These expensive properties were lived by wealthy middle-class occupants whose occupational and positions in society were higher in the ranking than teachers and lower in social status than high court judges. The houses down ‘New Road’ provided homes for consultants, surgeons, solicitors, barristers, doctors, mill owners and other people of rank and wealth. Standing in the centre of these (then) modern mansions of red-brick construction which were each fronted with huge wrought-ironed gates, was one small Victorian cottage which was considered by its wealthy neighbours to be an eyesore that lowered the tone of the area. To the passer-by, I would have to say that the small Victorian cottage that had been constructed in stone, did look to be somewhat out of time and place, positioned in the centre of its red-bricked neighbours which screamed out the opulence, power and wealth of their owners.

To my mother, the small Victorian cottage was no eyesore but her dream house, and it would remain so for the rest of her life. Each time she walked past it, knowing that the owner was no spring chicken, she would look for a ‘For Sale' sign in its front garden. I once asked her why she hoped to see it for sale when she must know that she would never have enough money to buy it? Her reply was, “I am not hoping to see a ‘For Sale’ sign, Billy. That cottage is my dream home. I was meant to live there. If it was sold before I ever managed to win the football pools and have enough money to buy it, I could never own it!”

The small Victorian stone cottage was the oldest dwelling down ‘New Road’. My mother was to set her heart on one day owning the property. This was her dream; a dream she knew deep inside that she would never wake up to. Yet, such likelihood would never become reason enough for her to stop dreaming her dream for as long as she lived.

When the Victorian cottage was first lived in, approximately a century before I was born, it would have stood alone in its own rural setting with its nearest neighbour being no closer than half a mile away. Then, during the 1940s, the demand for new red-brick houses of large size grew. Clean and modern dwellings were sought to house the better classes who worked with the lower socio classes of their towns, cities, and non-rural communities. Land was relatively cheap at the time, and demand for all type of housing was high. It mattered not if the houses built were estates dwellings to rent by the working-class families or were larger and grander houses for the wealthier private occupier. The speculative construction companies in the post-war building boom saw a good opportunity to cash in as the pre-war dilapidated housing stock needed to be replaced. Land was being bought up at a rapid rate by the building construction companies.

At the top of ‘New Road’, a brand-new council estate for rented tenants was built, where my family lived. Bordering this area and stretching one mile down the ‘New Road’ to Cleckheaton, expensive modern houses were built to occupy the rich, the up and coming, and the successful. The type of new dwellings built down both sides of the ‘New Road’ made the small Victorian cottage stick out like a sore thumb, and so the building constructor sought to buy out the then owner of the small cottage that sat within an acre of its own land. The owner, who was a spinster, had been born in the house and had never lived anywhere else. Having no siblings, he had inherited the house when her parents died. She was a lady in robust health and when first approached by the building contractor to sell her property for a good price, she refused outright. Even when she was reapproached with a sum that was reportedly far greater than the then market value of the cottage, she still refused to sell.

She had inherited the small cottage from her parents, as they had from theirs, and she told the building contractor that it was her home and that the only way she would be leaving it would be in a coffin. The new developers had planned to buy her house and land, demolish the small quaint stone cottage, and build in its place half a dozen red-brick modern dwellings for their upmarket buyers.

One day, as we walked back up the ‘New Road’, we passed the small cottage on the right. As usual, my mum remarked, “One day, I’ll have a cottage just like that, Billy, with red roses around the front door porch”. Of course, I knew that mum, who struggled as a rule to meet the weekly rent never would have the money to own her dream cottage. The only way her dream could have possibly come true was if any of her seven children won the football pools. Had any of her children done so, the very first thing we would have willingly bought with the winnings was mum’s dream cottage!

Now, here’s the strangest of things. Even though mum knew she would in all probability never have a cottage of her own, she never gave up dreaming her dream. As she often told me, “Before your dreams can come true, Billy, you must first dream them!” Even when she looked at her cottage, it was never with eyes of envy of its owner. My mother was far too charitable and unenviable a woman to think thus. Mum would have derived constant pleasure from the cottage’s presence simply knowing that it stood there and was happily lived in by the owner who had been born there.

I have often considered if there is any significant distinction between having a dream and having a driving purpose in one’s life? I have always believed that if we continue confidently along a parallel course of our dream, we will eventually come to live the life we imagine. As G.K. Chesterton once indicated, “At the centre of every man’s existence is a dream.”

I have always believed our dreams to be our unspoken day thoughts, the seedlings of a future reality not yet grown to fruition. Like any person who has been both good and bad throughout their life, thank God my dreams have always harboured the better part of me and have left the worse of me by the wayside. Because of both accident and medical circumstances, I have faced threat and uncertainty many times of not seeing another sunset. Because of many years of being unable to walk, and having to endure severe arthritis, and being ill, I have had my fair share of dreams and nightmares during a lifetime of nights and days. I am eternally grateful, however, that I always lived through my medical ordeals, and I have no doubt as to why such outcomes came about. To overcome my medical nightmares, I dared to dream, and dream again, and again. In my dreams, and in my life, whilst I may seem to have coped through my own strength, I know that strength can never originate in loneliness. In my dreams, as in my life, I know that while I believe in God, self, wife, family, friends and neighbours, that I will never walk alone however frightening or perilous my path may be.

I wish I could convey to every person who faces any medical problem or unhappy event in their life, that it makes no sense to try to deal with everything on your own when there are thousands of good and loving people in the world who are willing to share with you your worse moments and walk with you along your final journey. If it is understanding of the situation you need, all you need do is to talk, and someone will listen. If it is the touch of another, all you need do is to hold out your hand and someone will hold it. The person who helps you may be your God, your spouse, your partner, your siblings, your family, your friends, your neighbour, and even the very next person you pass in the High Street.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 24th March 2021

24/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to one couple who celebrate their wedding anniversary, and five birthday boys and girls. All the people mentioned today have Irish roots, and so it is fitting that I sing them a good old Irish song in celebration of their special day.

Today, my best friend and allotment buddy, Brian Moorehouse, and his wife, V’ron, celebrate their 48th wedding anniversary. Enjoy your special day, you two lovebirds. Thank you, Brian, for all the help you have given me and Sheila up at our allotment during the years we have been close friends, and thank you, V’ron for your constant support and words of encouragement during my illness. Bill and Sheila xx

Our five birthday celebrants today are Tricia Fraher who lives in Waterford, Ireland. The other four birthday celebrants all live in the same village of Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. We wish a happy birthday to Paul Mullins, and Carrick Davins, and Denise O Callaghan, and Margaret Walsh. We hope that all our birthday celebrants enjoy their special day, and I thank them for being my Facebook friend.

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Today will sadly be the last song that I am able to physically sing as the RHS of my jaw has finally seized up with aggressive cancer that has spread around my forehead, face, neck, and throat. I now find it hard to pronounce my words clearly, difficult to ingest food, and uncomfortable to chew and swallow. It physically pained me considerably to record the song I sing today for you, ‘Galway Town’, and I can only hope that I did it justice.

I commence my cancer drug trial on March 29th, 2021 at St. James’ Hospital in Leeds, and hopefully, while it cannot cure my cancer, it may extend my life a while longer. The pain has increased more daily in my face and mouth area over the past month, to the extent that it often produces an involuntary moan from me. It has also started to impinge upon my traditional good sleeping practice and finding it more difficult to eat solids is affecting my appetite. More than all that though, as I can no longer open my mouth enough and move my jaw normally, it has brought my three-year daily singing practise to an abrupt end.

Fortunately, I am way ahead in my stockpile of songs. I have another 300 plus recorded songs that I have not yet posted on my daily Facebook page, so you may even hear my voice from the other side of the green sod before you have heard all my earthly vocal repertoire. Please note that all 1300 songs were sung and recorded before today. It is also fitting that the last song I will probably record is an Irish song for my best friend and allotment buddies, Brian and V’ron, and the other five Irish birthday celebrants today.

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The Irish are a most unusual race, and I can say that without the slightest prejudice or malice because I am a born and bred Irish man. I remember attending an Irish funeral when I was a young boy. As the coffin was being lowered into the ground, the parish priest conducting the burial described the deceased as being “one of life’s scholars, a living saint to his family, friends, and community, and a gentleman with a heart of gold”. Hearing such plaudits, I regretted never having known this great man. By my early twenties, I had attended a great many Irish funerals, and had long established that every Irish man that has ever been buried has been described by the parish priest officiating the burial as being “one of life’s scholars, a living saint to his family, friends, and community, and a gentleman with a heart of gold”. My mother later told me that any bereaved Roman Catholic family could always get the priest to pronounce the deceased as being such a person, simply by adding an extra ten shillings to the customary priestly functions on the day!

My development from childhood into manhood witnessed me growing up an Irish immigrant in the foreign country of England, across the Irish Sea. Our family would often experience racial discrimination as my nationality was constantly run down and denigrated. Far too often I heard the Irish man being held up as the proverbial butt of an English man’s humour. The most common jokes in the world of children and adults at the time were jokes about four men of different nationalities, the English man, the Irishman, the Scottish man, and the Welshman. The location of where the joke was being told, and the nationality of the teller, would always indicate which nationality of the four came out best and which one turned out to be the butt of the joke. From the traditional English person’s point of view, the Irish man was always the one who was left looking a fool because of his tendency to forever grab hold of the wrong end of the red-hot poker. For instance; because the Irish midwife was usually described as being as ‘thick as a plank’, and who always saw the world arse end up, she would slap a newly born infant across the face to test if there was any life present!... or so the joke went.

I would like to use my post today to correct a few misapprehensions about the Irish person, and, especially, the Irish man. First, I adamantly refute the downright lie that all Irish men are big babies who never learn to let go of their mother’s apron string while their Mammy lives. The Irish man deeply respects the women in his life from the Virgin Mary down, and it is only natural that he will always prefer the taste of his mother’s milk, than that creamed product milked from Farmer Haggerty’s cow. I have often heard the English man issue the false charge that the Irishman can never fully loves the woman he married until the woman who brought him into this world no longer lives in it. To the Irishman the lines of affection are clearly defined; Mammy is mammy and wife is a wife! The secret of every Irish marriage is the woman of that marriage knows how to behave in it to best keep the peace. Few Irish men stray from their marriage vows because their wives and mothers of their children learn early on in their marriages how to be a saint in the community, the best cook ever in the kitchen, and both whore and innocent lover in the bedroom. Motherhood is a given in every Irish woman.

I would also like to dispel the false rumour that all Irishmen are born drunks; and if you ever see an Irishman drinking ten pints of cool Guinness in a pub on a hot summer’s afternoon, know that it is not an addiction for the hard stuff that is being displayed, but merely a large thirst after having done a good morning’s hard work. If you really had any understanding about the Irish fella at the bar, you would know that drinking ten pints of Guinness in an afternoon represents ‘taking things easy'. Had he wanted to, the Irishman could have drunk twenty pints without belching or breaking wind once.

When it comes to wisdom, I will have you know that Irish men are not endowed with the brains of a Welsh sheep who cannot distinguish between ram or shepherd on a cold night in the Brecon Beacons. The Irishman is too clever for any of their three closest nationalities. Whereas much of English folk’s learning comes from stuffy old books off a dusty shelf, the learning of a true Irishman comes straight from his head, and the hard lessons of life. If a seven-year-old son asks his Irish father “How do babies get of Mammy’s tummy”, the Irish father will simply tell it as it is, “The same way it got in, son!” Once an Irishman experiences any action, it does not have to be repeated to sink in.

Although natural-born winners in all that they undertake in life, the Irishman never has to be a poor loser. Indeed, were the Irishman ever to come second, it would be because he wanted to. In the unlikely event that the Irish man actually lost, he would be a ‘good loser’ because he is a gentleman and a true gamesman through and through. He does not need to depend on playing dirty tricks to win a pub dart match Irish like spiking an Irishman’s straight whiskey with water. Irish dart throwers have learned their skill from studying their bible and the scriptures. They possess the wisdom of Solomon and the dexterity of his father David when it comes to slinging a dart towards the bull’s eye in the taproom. The Irish man knows only too well how some nationalities are poor losers when the chips are down, so when an Irishman enters any sporting match, he makes a point of not beating his opponent too badly. In fact, he has often been known to throw a match to allow his opponent to save face with their mates.

And while we’re at it, let us also dispel this notion about all Irishmen having originally come from the same family of travelling tinkers. While it is true that the Romans built the first roads in Great Britain, it was the Irish who built the best roads! Without the skill and toil of the Irish navvy, there would be no roads to ride throughout the length and breadth of England, Scotland, and Wales. So, as far as these ‘tinker‘ and ‘traveller’ jibes which are often levelled at us Irish, I have to remind you of the following. It was the Irish men who built the roads and were the ‘constructors’ of them, but it is the English who are 'the travellers'. And while I am on the subject, we also built most of your motorways, your bridges, your underground tunnels, sewers, canals, railways, and even the houses that the English live in or rent!

I know that a few English men will often remark about the shoddy workmanship of tarmac driveways done in an afternoon by two men with Irish accents that are thicker than the layer of hardcore they put down beneath a skimmed surface of tarmac that starts to break up after the first person has walked to cross it the day after. I ask you now, even if we assumed that the workers were not pretending to be of Irish descent, even were we to agree that the cowboy workers were of low-grade Irish stock, which two couples exercised the most intelligence do you think? Was it the two workers called ‘Murphy’ driving an old tarmac lorry carrying the black stuff, with no registration plates to front or rear of the vehicle with which to track and report it, and who charged two grand for an afternoon’s work, or was it the couple of English eejits who were prepared to pay £2000 cash in hand for a job badly done?

‘What about the large families they breed?’ I hear. This is a common charge levelled against the Irish migrant. I acknowledge that the average Irish Catholic married couple will invariably parent more children than will English couples within their often-trialled relationships. This practice of parenting larger families, however, has less to do with perceived fecklessness or papal indoctrination and has more to do with having no more children than is ‘absolutely necessary'. One of the reasons why Irish Catholic couples have larger families is that their children are usually confined to just one relationship. The most important reason though is that they simply keep on having one child after another child until they have a ‘good one’; then they stop!

As to people charging the Irish with being big drinkers and big eaters, let me put you straight on this point regarding Irish consumption. We may eat more on our plate than the English diner, but that is because we chew all our food and can store it easily after digestion until we evacuate it as a solid, instead of converting it to a gaseous fart composed of tiny amounts of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen sulphide, and expelled in the politest of social circles with nothing but the word of ‘sorry’. Also, given the fact that the Irish nation has had centuries experiencing starvation rations and failed crops, nobody should not be surprised if we always finish off what is on our plate.

Irish people, contrary to the popular belief of some bigots are economic all they undertake. They are brought up knowing that life is hard enough without them trying to make it any harder for themselves. Today’s song is a good example. When I listened to the song that I sing today for the first time, it was St. Patrick’s Day of 2021. After about one hour of listening to many Irish songs that day, I was amazed to discover around a dozen different songs with the same tune, and similar lyrics.

After giving this melodic enigma some thought, I immediately concluded that the Irish are simply being ‘economical’ with the use of their own bodily energy and brainpower in the mere composition and writing of a good old Irish song. Why row furiously along the river like one is trying to win a boat race, when one can sail with the relaxing wind? When I thought about it long enough, I knew deep down that it is the same old melodic structure that the old squeeze box (concertina) plays to accompany every Irish song that has ever been sung or every Irish tune that has ever been danced.

Think about it one minute? What greater way is there to save energy and to preserve one’s brainpower than to borrow an old song from the past and put a few new words to it to make a new song? That is why I was able to discover so many songs about Galway Town, all of which varied enough from each other to be accurately described as being ‘different’ from each other. I also found songs about almost every other town that is found in Ireland where this pick-and-mix musical and lyrical construction has been liberally applied to the finished masterpiece of a local folk song.

So, the next time you hear any man (English, Scottish, Welsh, or otherwise) glibly knock my nationality and race, please correct their false impression immediately. Tell the maligner that every true Irish man is ‘one of life’s scholars, a living saint to his family, friends, and community, and a gentleman with a heart of gold’. And as you kindly inform them of these facts, speak in the certain knowledge that ‘this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!’

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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ONE ENCORE: BILL'S LAST SONG: MARCH 24TH, 2021

24/3/2021

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ONE ENCORE: BILL'S LAST SONG: MARCH 24TH, 2021
The other day I was watching Piers Morgan interview the youngest Nolan sister on the television, Coleen Nolan, and I heard that marvellous record, 'I'm in the Mood for Dancing'. I just had to try it out today despite knowing that however bad it sounded, it would be a good exercise for my RHS jaw that has almost packed in working totally.
Needless to say, I merely confirmed my worse fears. It hurt so much, that I will not try to repeat the exercise. So just to show you what half an open mouth is capable of sounding like, for tonight only, I give to my only encore.

Fortunately, I have one year's recorded videos of songs I have not published on my Facebook page, and continuing tomorrow, either I or Sheila will be putting one of these songs up daily. The songs will be accompanied by a few words from myself if I can manage, and if my wife Sheila puts up a daily song on my behalf, you can have the voice without the attached wordage.

It would be nice to think that this drug I receive once every three weeks, and commencing next Monday will extend my life in some measure, and may also temporarily shrink my facial cancer enough to enable my full jaw to briefly work again. If it did, I will most certainly try to get back in the saddle of singing as a valuable facial exercise.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 23rd March 2021

23/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to four people who celebrate their birthday today. We wish a happy birthday to my artist friend Garbor Deri who lives in West Sussex: Annemarie Houlihan and Anthony Walsh who live in Waterford, Ireland: and my cousin Pedro Achymo who lives in London, England. Enjoy your special day and thank you all for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’. This song was composed by Cole Porter and was first sung in the 1934 Broadway musical ‘Anything Goes’, and then in the 1936 film version. Originally sung by Ethel Merman, it has been covered by dozens of prominent performers, including Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.

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This song reminds me of my training days when I was studying ‘Behaviour Modification Methods’ at Manchester University on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of each week. On Thursday and Friday, we would observe top Clinical Psychologists in a Rochdale Hospital alongside their patients. We were essentially observing various Behaviour Modification methods being practised by the Clinical Psychologists in situ. During our hospital placement each week there would be one day devoted to the observation of our mentors and the other day would be devoted to lectures and role-play practice of given situations. This was a two-year course for a Diploma in ‘Advanced Social Work Methods’.

One afternoon, the lecturing Clinical Psychologist gave us a situation to discuss in different groups. He told us that the situation had really occurred and was not a fabricated scenario and that he had been the psychologist who had dealt with it.

The lecturing Clinical Psychologist told us about a seven-year-old boy who had been a patient of his for six-months. He had been asked to assess the boy by the Educational Psychologist of the boy’s former school, from which he had been expelled for violent and disruptive behaviour. The boy would apparently display aggressive behaviour every time he did not get his own way. The seven-year-old had already attended two different schools since he first started at First School at the age of 5 years, and following repeated discipline warnings, each school had expelled him because of his violent behaviour displayed against other school pupils. At his last school, the boy also kicked a teacher in the shins after she had tried to prevent him from hitting another child in her classroom.

The 7-year-old aggressive boy had been a reluctant visitor to see the Clinical Psychologist that morning and had already thrown a tantrum after his mother insisted that he accompany her to keep their appointment at the Hospital Clinic. The boy and his mother arrived at the Clinic and took their seats in a plush waiting area. They were half an hour late for their scheduled appointment due to the boy’s tantrums at home before they set off. Another younger boy aged 5 years was also waiting to see the Clinical Psychologist. They were on time for their appointment so the older boy’s mother was told that they would now be behind the younger boy.

As the aggressive boy was being dragged into the waiting area and plonked on a seat by his frustrated mother, the younger boy was merrily rocking away on a large wooden rocking horse nearby. The 7-year-old boy saw him and decided he wanted to ride the horse also. Before his mother realised what her son was doing, the aggressive boy approached the younger boy on the rocking horse and demanded in a loud menacing voice, “Get off the horse. I want to get on, now!” The younger boy refused and appealed to his mother nearby to stop the 7-year-old boy from bullying him.

Having had his demand ignored, the aggressive older boy pulled the younger boy off the rocking horse forcefully, kicked him on the floor and mounted the horse. The younger boy started crying and the Clinical Psychologist came out of his office to assess what all the racket was about. The mother of the 5-year-old boy, whose son was in tears, related her version of events to the Clinical Psychologist as the mother to the 7-year-old was repeatedly asking her disobedient son to get off the rocking horse and return to his seat beside her. She also told her son to apologise to the young boy he had just assaulted. Her son retorted angrily that he would not, and he continued to rock on. His mother was most apologetic to the other boy, the boy’s mother, and the Clinical Psychologist nearby.

“Leave it to me,” said the Clinical Psychologist as he walked across to the aggressive boy on the rocking horse, and after pausing the movement of the rocking horse he brought it to an abrupt halt. The aggressive 7-year-old became frustrated and was just about to yell some abuse at the psychologist when he heard a whooshing ‘hush’ from the mouth of the Clinical Psychologist who was commanding quietness. The Clinical Psychologist then approached the aggressive boy and whispered quietly in his ear.

Seconds later, the boy dismounted the rocking horse, and quietly gave the five-year-old boy he had kicked a reluctant apology, “Sorry for kicking you.” The aggressive boy also apologised to the boy’s mother and went to sit down beside his own mother. Until he was called into the Clinical Psychologist’s office for his assessment interview later that morning, we were told that he was as quiet as a mouse and did not utter one word.

The lecturer had grabbed our attention, retained it throughout his tale, and he had also gained our admiration into the bargain. Naturally, his students wanted to learn this highly effective Behaviour Modification method that had proved so successful. He paused, smiled, and told us what he had whispered in the 7-year-old aggressive boy’s ear:

“Little boy, I am three times your size and I eat brats like you for breakfast. I am going to silently count to ten, and when I get to ten, you will have got off the rocking horse and apologised to the boy and his mother. If you have not apologised properly to each of them, I will drag you off the horse myself and give you the biggest kicking you have ever had. Now, do you understand?”

That day’s teaching was to emphasise that sometimes the best dish to serve is one of clear and unambiguous punishment. He also pointed out that occasionally, a ‘rewarding’ dish is best suited to bring about desired behavioural change than one of ‘punishment’. Also, we were told that a combination of properly sequenced ‘punishment and reward’ can both change the inappropriate behaviour of an individual as well as reinforce that the changed behaviour remains more permanent. We were also left in no doubt that when one tries to meet force with force in a battle of wills, the winner may appear to be the person who is prepared to exercise the most/greatest force of the two, but such a display of force will only produce a ‘temporary response of compliance’ by the initial aggressor. Unless the 7-year-old boy had been taught otherwise by the Clinical Psychologist in their later sessions, he would have been left with the clear and erroneous impression that aggressive force is the best way to get one’s way!

During later years of my life when I held many assemblies in Yorkshire schools on the subject of bullying, I remembered the lecture by the Rochdale Clinical Psychologist. I reminded the children meeting aggression with more aggression only makes matters worse. I told them that most bullies in life have often been bullied themselves by aggressive parents, and that love and understanding has a better chance of quelling the aggression of another person than giving them back more aggression than they give you.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 22nd March 2021

22/3/2021

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I dedicate today’s song to seven Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish a happy birthday to Mary Quinlan and Mags McGrath who live in Waterford, Ireland: Mike Morrissey who comes from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary but who now lives in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey: Marie Kelly who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Yvonne Power who lives in Tipperary, Ireland: Kim Harris who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA.: Nick Bennett, who lives in Haworth, West Yorkshire. We hope that you all enjoy your special day and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Josephine’. This song was recorded by the British singer-songwriter, Chris Rea. The song comes from his album called ‘Shamrock Diaries’ which reached the Top 10 in France and the Netherlands in 1985. It was written for his daughter of the same name. Chris rea would also later name a song after his youngest daughter, Julia on the album ‘Espresso Logic’ in 1993.

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After I first heard Chris Rea come over the radio airwaves whilst driving my car one Christmas time with his most famous hit ‘Driving Home for Christmas’, I was spurred on to look out for other songs of his. I have recently looked up and listened to all his musical works one afternoon and evening. Almost every song he writes and sings has a ‘rolling beat’ played to a catchy guitar background as though it was coming out of a trucker’s cab radio being driven down Route 66. It is as though the words of his songs take him on some journey down some highway.

He is an accomplished guitar player and because so many of his recorded songs contain so few words in them, I suspect that the musical beat is as important, if not more so than the vocal message. Invariably, many of his songs are composed of no more than a few lines of rhyming couplets which are repeated a number of times. It is as though he is saying to the listener, “Hey guys, listen to this guitar music; and I‘ve thrown in a few rhyming words just to be able to legitimately call it a song instead of a tune!”

My two favourite songs by Chris rea will forever be, ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ and ‘Road to Hell’.

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Of all the females I have known and have been acquainted with during my life, I cannot recall one Josephine having been among them. Josephine is the female form of the name Joseph and is an English version of the French name Joséphine. The name is of Hebrew origin ‘Yosef’ meaning ‘shall grow’.

None of us can choose the name our parents give us at birth, but we can all legally change it when we reach adulthood should we wish to be known by another name. Fortunately, I have always liked my Christian and surname. I was baptised William after my maternal grandfather, and I have always called Billy by any Forde family member (named after my father’s brother) whilst my everyday name to my friends and workmates was Bill. I have often wondered what I would do if my parents had given me a girl’s name at birth or decided to call me Archibald, Fortescue, or Reginald? Would I have lived with it or modified it to make it more acceptable to my ears? It is even possible to change one’s surname by deed poll, and my sister Susan did this and assumed our maternal grandparents' Irish name.

In fact, it is almost as easy to change one’s name today either in part or whole, as it is to change some item one has bought in an iron monger’s shop. As we move further into the 21st century, we can even change our gender today if we cannot accept the body that we were born into. Or if we wish to change our sexual orientation in a non-invasive manner that does not require an operation, it could not be easier; we simply need to declare ourselves man, or woman, or fish!

Today, it is extremely easy to be designated one of the ‘trans people’, whereas way back in the late 1960s and early 70s, the only way we were able to bring a bit of extra colour into our lives was by watching the British all-female dance troupe called ‘Pan’s People’ on the ‘Top of the Pops’. They were that lovely, it would not have bothered me in the slightest whether they were called Jack or Jill.

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 21st March 2021

21/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to my deceased father who was born on March 21st, 1916, and who died thirty years ago in March 1991. All your seven children wish you a heavenly birthday, dad. The post is extremely long as it provides an extensive account of my father's character and traits.

I also wish a happy birthday to my Facebook friend, Catherine Bailey who lives in Haworth, West Yorkshire. I hope that you enjoy your special day, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today was my father’s favourite song, ‘Sweet Sixteen’. Today was my father’s birthday and had he been alive, he would have reached 105 years of age. Dad had two favourite songs; in fact, these were the only two songs he ever sang to our knowledge; ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’. Today, I dedicate ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ to my late father. Happy heavenly birthday, dad. All your children love you: Billy, Mary, Eileen, Patrick, Peter, Michael, and Susan xxx

Today’s song is ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’. This popular song was written by James Thornton and was published in 1898. Inspired and sung by the composer's wife, the ballad quickly became a hit song in vaudeville. It has a long recording history that includes numerous popular singers.

James Thornton was a vaudevillian who was best-known during his life for his comedy monologues. However, he composed numerous popular songs, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’, published in 1898, was inspired by Thornton's wife, Bonnie, when she asked her husband if he still loved her. Thornton replied, "I love you like I did when you were sweet sixteen." Bonnie Thornton, a popular vaudeville singer who sang many of her husband's compositions then introduced the song in her act. ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ sold over a million copies of sheet music, which was a fantastic number of music sheets for its time. The song has been covered over the past century by many artists.

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It is not often that the popularity of any song endures from one century to the next, but this song has so far been in existence for 123 years. In my youth, all the nation whistled while they relaxed, and they also whistled while they worked. The postman, the milkman, and every other man I ever met as a boy whistled as they walked and worked through their day. Indeed, one of the most popular wartime radio programmes was called, ‘Whistle While You Work’.

My father was no different where the love of whistling was concerned. Indeed, dad loved to hear the world’s greatest whistler, Ronnie Ronalde making his wonderful bird noises over the radio and whistling and singing his beautiful songs. Ronnie Ronalde’s combination of whistling and singing was simply marvellous. Dad would have been so pleased to know that Ronnie Ronalde was to become a friend of his firstborn during the early 2000s. Ronnie sent me and Sheila an autographed biography of his life as my wedding present in 2012, plus one of his signed CDs. I was initially introduced into his social circle by a friend of mine, but sadly he died a few years later in 2015. His whistling imitations of bird song led to his greatest hits like ‘If I Was a Blackbird’ and ‘In a Monastery Garden’.

I was born the oldest of seven children. My father was a relatively uneducated man and had been born into abject poverty in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Dad was only 12 years old when he was obliged to leave his school life behind and join the ranks of the workers. My father was a simple man who kept his own company and never drank alcohol; presumably, because his father had been an alcoholic. Dad was the most independent man I ever knew, along with being the most modest man I ever met. He was strict in discipline and was one of the most stubborn men alive.

Dad had also been an accomplished footballer at both county and country levels of participation. Dad played soccer for County Kilkenny before he was twenty years old. He then went on to play soccer for both the first and second soccer squad of the Irish national team. I had often seen a framed photograph of a football team in the lounge. We would pass it twenty times a day as we walked in and out of the front room, but it was never specifically discussed in the family until my tenth year of life, and my mother never once mentioned the importance the image held in my father’s football career. Her reluctance to tell us about the specifics of my father’s football career, was because it represented a lonelier period in her life when she was mothering three small children as a football widow. She would later complain that while my father was off kicking an old ball and chasing glory around some soccer pitch, she was left minding his children and washing his clothes for him to wear on his return home.

The unmentioned framed image in our front room was a photograph of the Irish National Second Eleven with my father seated at its centre, with the football between his legs (Captain of Ireland’s Second Eleven Soccer Team at the time). It was later revealed that my father also made it into the Irish National First Eleven soccer squad on several occasions. My father’s regular absence from home was a source of constant conflict between him and mum during their first four years of marriage. Being the wife of a man who played soccer for Ireland then wasn’t like being a football Wag of today, with all the luxurious trappings to boot.

First, the national soccer players for Ireland in the late thirties and early 1940s received no wages. The only money that they ever received came in the form of recompense and not remuneration. These were travel and out of pocket expenses. Such financial circumstances would prevail in Eire until after the ‘Second World War’. My mother would not have minded being a football widow for the first four years of her married life had her husband been receiving a significant wage and a commensurate standard of living like the soccer wives of professional footballers earn today, but both situations held no similarity. My mother found herself parenting three children under the ages of 5 years and living in an overcrowded and cheap rented flat. She was in fact a soccer widow half of every week of the year; a situation that was nothing to cheer or write home about as representing an indication of the family’s increased prosperity since leaving her parent’s home in Portlaw after her marriage to my father. Half of the week was reportedly spent waiting for the other half the week to arrive with a bit of money to buy feed the children and the equally hungry gas meter.

My dad played football for the glory of the sport and his reward was the pride of playing for his county and country. He was not as bothered about the lack of wage as my lonely mother was about his constant absence from herself and their three children. Consequently, my father’s footballing career was always a bone of contention between them, and this was the reason it had never once been spoken about in front of myself and my younger siblings during the early years of our development. Indeed, had my father not gone on one of his rare holidays back home to County Kilkenny, his soccer skills may never have come to the attention of his seven children.

One year, my father went back to Kilkenny for a rare holiday break. I only knew him to return to Ireland twice since we had arrived in West Yorkshire in 1945. On this occasion, he went to look up the site where his father had been buried and he intended to stay with the Brennan’s, who had always treated him as though he had been born into their family. Dad was utterly surprised to be met at the railway station when he alighted the train, by a welcoming brass band that greeted the return of a ‘football hero from Kilkenny’. According to the Kilkenny People’ newspaper, the brass band reception then led the parade of people who cheered dad as they walked through town. My father was triumphantly marched through the city centre, up to the Brennan household where he would stay until he returned home to England. Dad had gone on that holiday alone, and we never would have known of the soccer hero’s welcome he had received, had not a Kilkenny family friend sent the newspaper cutting to my mother a few weeks later after dad had returned from his week’s break in Kilkenny.

By the age of ten years, I had become an excellent football player, and I was even selected to play in the school adult team with boys aged 13 and 14 years. Our school soccer team at ‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ in Heckmondwike had just obtained a new team shirt. Its pattern was one in green and white chequered squares, and the cost of purchasing a shirt was £2: 10 shillings. The fifty shillings cost of the football strip might as well have been £50, as such a sizable sum was an impossible amount for my family to purchase on my behalf. £2: 10 shillings represented one-fifth of my father’s weekly wage as a miner. Naturally, I was disappointed not to be able to purchase a shirt in the school’s colours, especially as I was honoured to have been accepted to play in the big boys’ team as I turned 11 years old.

Before dad left for work that day and knowing that his oldest son would be embarrassed to be the only player running around the football field in a green T-shirt instead of the official school soccer strip, he presented me with an old football shirt that he had used in his twenties. The shirt was the team shirt he had proudly worn when he played soccer for Eire (Southern Ireland). Its size naturally buried me, and its hem fell far below my waistline and reached halfway down my legs, but it made me immensely proud to wear it. I was the happiest and most envied player in ‘St. Patrick’s School Football Team’ that memorable day in 1952. Unfortunately, I did not score, and we lost 8-0.

Blood, flesh, and bone, banded by strands of strictness and streaks of stubbornness, religiosity, and discipline made up my father’s body from head to toe. Dad was also as stubborn as an ass who refused to pull the cart a yard farther unless he wanted to walk the road ahead. As for being single-minded, once he made a decision, he never changed it (even when he was wrong). When he shook hands with another man and gave his word, he kept it, whatever the cost. Despite being a strict Roman Catholic, dad displayed a strong Protestant work ethic which was nothing short of ‘Calvinistic’ in the significance he placed upon the value of being industrious. He had no time for the merits of education, and he considered any education inside the school classroom to be far less important than what one could learn at the workbench of any factory or on the streets of life. Dad believed that ‘hard manual work’ carried out through the sweat of one’s brow and the aching of one’s arms, was the surest way to guarantee oneself a place in heaven. He had been brought up indoctrinated and inbred with the strictest of work ethics that stated no type of work was beneath the dignity of any good man. He believed vehemently that the first duty of every married man and father was to provide food for his wife and children. Dad believed that serving his family, his employer, his principles, and his God was all there was for any good man to live for.

My father worked hard all his life from boyhood to his retirement age. He was a miner for twenty years after the family first migrated to West Yorkshire, England for a more prosperous life in the mid-40s. I will never forget when I was a young teenager, and the pit my father worked at went on strike. The strike was supported by the entire workforce, except for one person, my father. Dad was the only man to walk through the picket line. Such a lonely act took great courage for any worker to do at the time and would always result in the strike-breaker being sent to ‘Coventry’ when the men eventually returned to work and their normal roles in the pit were resumed. Being ‘sent to Coventry’ resulted in being shunned by all of one’s workmates and having nobody speak to you all shift long. Any worker who spoke to any worker who had been ‘sent to Coventry’ was also shunned and given the ‘silent treatment’ in a similar manner.

Surprisingly, this industrial penalty did not occur in my father’s case, presumably because of my father’s principles of supporting his wife and children at all cost were generally respected among his workmates. However, he did not remain scot-free for having crossed the picket line, and when the miners went back to work after the strike, some of the men did not want to allow my father to get off so easily for daring to ignore the strike.

After the strike ended, one huge-sized man around six feet six inches tall called Horace Housecroft, attempted to physically assault my father. My father was a broad-shouldered stocky man of small height. Dad stood no taller than 5 feet and seven inches and weighed five stones less than Horace in weight. However tough dad was, one of Horace’s punches would have knocked him out for certain. When Horace moved to physically attack my father, my father saw the rage in Horace’s eyes and could see that he was determined to do him damage. With no chance of outmatching Horace in physical combat, my father took the only action he could think of on the spot. Knowing that he hadn’t a cat in hell's chance of fighting off his huge opponent off long enough to prevent himself being beaten to a pulp by Horace’s shovelled-sized fists, dad raised the pit shovel he was holding, and with one heavy blow to Horace’s head, he flattened this giant of a man to the ground.

Horace was rendered unconscious and taken to hospital with severe head injuries, and although Horace didn’t return to work for two months, by the time he did, dad had left the mine and was working in a foundry, having been tactfully ‘laid off’ meanwhile. Paradoxically, Horace (whose house on Seventh Avenue was visible from our kitchen window) and my father had not only been workmates, but they were also close neighbours on Windybank Estate. Before Horace returned to work, he and my father had become the best of friends, and they remained friends for the rest of their lives. For many years after, whenever the residents of Windybank Estate mentioned my father in passing, dad was regularly referred as ‘Paddy Forde, the husband to Maureen on 8th Avenue who flattened Horace Housecroft of 7th Avenue with one blow to the head!” Occasionally, added to this description of dad might be “with a pit shovel”. Either way, nobody ever messed with dad again!

As the father of seven children, dad never had a choice of how he responded to either going or not going on strike as a miner. For dad, putting food on the family table and in his children’s bellies came first. Dad used to say, “Principles are a luxury of the rich, Billy. They never filled a poor man’s belly or the stomachs of his family”.

When dad came home from working at the pit face after an 8-hour shift, he would be as black as black could be, covered and caked in coal dust. After he had taken off his clogs, he would go upstairs to spend half an hour luxuriating in the bath. Dad would often joke that no matter how hard any miner scrubbed his skin, he could never get rid of all the coal dust in the paws of his skin. As for the parts none could see (the miner’s lungs) a lifetime’s coal lodged there would see most miners die long before their time with what was commonly called ‘back lung’), and silicosis.

Dad loved the new council house on the council estate. It had flushing lavatories inside and outside that need not be shared with one’s neighbours, and the luxury of a ceramic bath. We all loved it! It was far better having a ceramic bath anchored to the floorboards of its own private room that accommodated it, instead of the previous bathing receptacle that the entire family used in rotation; a large tin bath that hung on the wall between use and which would be filled with a dozen kettles of boiled water instead of the mere turning of a hot water tap!

As dad bathed in our council house bathroom, I and sisters Mary and Eileen would listen outside the door and giggle as we heard him quietly sing. The bathroom was the only place in the world that anyone ever heard my shy father sing. Dad might be heard whistling often, like all the men of the time did, but he only ever sang two songs, and the only place he sang was in the privacy of the bathroom. Dad’s two songs were, ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

In loving memory of your heavenly birthday, Dad, I sing you one of your favourite songs, ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’. Love from Billy, Mary, Eileen, Patrick, Peter, Michael and Susan xxxxxxx

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 20th March 2021

20/3/2021

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I dedicate today’s song to two Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish happy birthday to Martin Wall who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland, and Susan Grijalva who lives in Crestline, California USA. Martin and Susan, enjoy your special day, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Sailing’. My song today is ‘Sailing’. This song was composed by Gavin Sutherland of the ‘Sutherland Brothers’ in 1972 and was best known as a 1975 international hit for Rod Stewart.

Gavin Sutherland would comment: "Most people take the song to be about a young guy telling his girl that he's crossing the Atlantic to be with her. In fact, the song's got nothing to do with romance or ships. It is an account of mankind's spiritual odyssey through life on his way to freedom and fulfillment with the Supreme Being."

Written on the beach by Blythe Bridge, ‘Sailing’ was recorded by the Sutherland Brothers – a duo consisting of Gavin and Iain Sutherland. ‘Sailing’ peaked at Number 54 in July 1972. Rod Stewart's version of the song was recorded for his first album in North America rather than Great Britain called ‘Atlantic Crossing’.

I remember first hearing Rod Stewart sing this song, and I was pleased to hear Vera Lynn record it in 2017. Vera was my mother’s favourite singer, and I was very fortunate that she would become a good friend of mine for the last thirty years of her 103-year life. Vera was born on March 20th, 2017, and today would have been her birthday, so the song is a fitting selection to mark the occasion.

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Gavin Sutherland quoted that the song was an account of mankind's spiritual odyssey through life on his way to freedom and fulfillment with the Supreme Being. For my part, despite having always been a poor sailor I have travelled on a personal voyage ever since a bad traffic accident crippled me at the early age of 11 years and left me unable to walk for the following three years.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that everything significant or momentous that ever happened to me in my life was influenced by that wagon that knocked me down, ran over me, and twisted my body-spine curvature around its main drive propellor shaft. The accident left me close to death and hospitalised me for nine months and kept me off school for two years after hospital discharge. However, in a strange way, this traumatic experience also brought me closer to a more wholesome and purposeful way of life, every minute of which has brought me tremendous satisfaction and immense pleasure. Virtually every bone in my body was broken after the wagon ran over me, and distorted them out of their natural position. My spine was badly injured, and my chest collapsed with all except two of its 24 ribs broken and matted. I was left with a punctured lung, and all my limbs were broken in several places each. I remained bodily disfigured in my legs thereafter, with half of a kneecap missing, and one leg left 3 inches shorter than the other after having dozens of operations breaking and re-setting over a two-year period.

Although I was medically informed that I would never walk again, it essentially took me two years from the day of my accident to be able to stand on my own feet again and withstand my own body weight, and another year to walk under my own steam. That was followed by two years hobbling about, and I was almost 16 years old before I started to regain enough mobility to start engaging in some sport and other activities again which the previous five years had prevented me from doing. My aim was to regain better body balance, and I needed to learn to walk in a more normal gait. Over 46 operations on my left leg breaking and re-setting had left it almost 3 inches shorter than my right leg and riddled with arthritis. To compensate for my crippled movement, I engaged in every activity I could to ensure that no young man my own age would ever be able to call me a cripple or get the better of me in a fight.
I know how foolish that thought may appear to the reader of my post today, but during the 1950s and 1960s, while we never fought two on one, or kick and bite, or carry weapons, boys and young men still exercised a sort of gang code in which peer group acceptance was given to those who could look after themselves in a street fight, whatever their height, weight or other bodily features.

Between the ages of 16 and 21 years, I engaged in developing my skills in boxing, amateur wrestling, judo, running, tennis, weightlifting, rugby, and I did as much rock and rolling on the dance floors as I could. I would engage in these activities five nights during the week and on Saturday noon and Sunday afternoon, without fail. I did all this to improve my body balance and increase my likelihood of never coming off second best, either on the dance floor or in the boxing ring. I succeeded generally on the dance floor, but I frequently came a poor second in the boxing ring. This vigorous exercise routine worked for me, and although there were many sports and activities that I could not do again (like football or sprinting), I was able to exchange speed of running with the stamina and endurance required to run long distance, and I was able to use the agility and speed of my fast hands with boxing, wrestling, judo and table tennis, instead of depending on any swiftness of foot. Playing football remained out for me as I would frequently become unbalanced and stumble if I turned suddenly, but I managed to play rugby for three seasons between the ages of 17-20 years.

Being a 'with it' teenager and gang member in the 1950s involved being good at fighting, drinking, dancing, and pulling the birds. These were the qualities that, rightfully or wrongly, accorded a young man peer-respect and ensured a high degree of popularity within one’s social group.

I was in my early thirties before I learned that it took more guts to walk away from a fight than to engage in a fisticuffs brawl, especially when one knew that they would win. I would reach my forties before I was obliged to accept that marriage was not necessarily ‘forever’ and that no one person in a marriage can keep it alive once the other person is determined it should be killed off.

My absence of mobility, along with my rheumatic legs considerably worsening yearly from my mid-40s to the age of 53 years, when I was obliged to retire early from my Probation Officer career on the grounds of disability and ill health. Only then did I realise how productive life in retirement can be. Initially, I involved myself in gardening more and more, and the more I learned about my garden and its plants and natural inhabitants, the more I learned about the needs of my wife and children, and friends and neighbours. Nature taught me more about nurture and vice versa. I gradually grew to appreciate the similar needs of plants and people for the life of each to thrive. I learned that humans needed emotional nutrients every bit as much as flowers and botanical plants require the nutrient of water, sun, shade and proper positioning to survive and thrive in their respective environments. I learned that we all grow better when we are perfectly placed and are given our own space, and face no unwanted invasion. Just as plants need their own space to grow better, so a family unit is happier if it t remains uncrowded. Also, moving to a new house can be just as disruptive to the human nervous system as moving a plant from its favourite shady spot to a different place in the garden. Just as good next-door neighbours are missed by people moving house, plants being placed elsewhere in the garden greatly miss the presence of their neighbouring soil which they were supported by for many years.
I learned that just as water, shade, sun, and nutrients are needed by every garden plant to grow and thrive, so humans need their equivalent boosts to thrive in life also. The similarities to be found in nature and nurture, and in plant and person are too many for any sensible person to ignore. Plants and humans need constant attention, care and encouragement to live and thrive in their individual splendour. They need love shown to them; they need the love told to them, and they need love felt by them. Everyone mocked Prince Charles for ‘talking to his plants, except the plants which thrived as a consequence of his loving care demonstrated. .I learned that humans thrive on being appropriately attended to, just like plants, and that there are also times when they hate being fussed over. I learned that humans and plants hibernate in their own respective ways. Each requires restful periods where they can ‘take time out’ and be allowed not to be at their best and loudest. This enables the rebirth of both plant and person when they are reinvigorated with life before they bloom again the following spring.

My 60s witnessed a rejuvenation in my own life when I needed to return to many activities of my youth. I took up bopping again and started attending rock and roll clubs all over the country with my sister Mary, and her partner Richard, and their rock and roll friends. I also increased my writing of poetry and rapidly increased my writing of novels. I had over five dozen novels published by 2017. I was also able to give all my book sales profits (over £200,000 between 1990-2003) to charitable causes and I became a good friend with hundreds of famous people who read my books to thousands of children in their Yorkshire schools.

My seventies also brought me back to singing regularly. Having been a good singer in my youth, I did not sing in public again between the ages of 21 years and 74. My recent cancers aggravated my restricted mobility, and two heart attacks within the same week,15 years ago, depleted the functioning of my lungs to COPD level. After reading that daily singing practice can greatly improve lung capacity and increase oxygenation, I began a singing regime of two hours daily three years ago. I sing and I post a new song daily on my Facebook page and have now recorded over 1000 (one thousand) videoed songs. My lung capacity and oxygenation levels have improved by 20 percent, and I am once more within the normal levels. I have also found joy in singing again.

I am now in my late 70s and my increasing immobility and experience of having to contend with three different body cancers, plus numerous cancer operations and cancer treatments this decade has taken a significant toll on my body. Yet, despite these medical issues, the past decade has strangely witnessed the happiest years of my life. My aggressive skin cancer has spread all over the RHS of my head and is now in my forehead, neck, cheek, throat, shoulder, and ear. I have been offered a rare place on a very expensive cancer drug trial (£4600 a shot every three weeks) at St. James’ Hospital in Leeds. I start on March 29th. The drug cannot cure aggressive skin cancer as it has advanced too far. If the drug can be tolerated by my body, and if it works positively on my behalf, while it cannot cure my cancer, it could possibly extend my life a bit longer. However, its toxicity can cause fatal side effects like inflammation in the lungs and other major organs, that even though it cannot cure, ironically, it can kill the patient taking it by advancing their death.

Despite having been diagnosed with terminal blood cancer three months after my wedding to my beautiful wife, Sheila (14 years younger than me) on my 70th birthday, I feel like that I have at last learned how best to enjoy my life. It is ironic that only when I faced certain death, am I enabled to face life more purposely. I am happier today than in any year before I met and fell in love with Sheila. Despite having had nine cancer operations, two lengthy courses of chemotherapy, twenty sessions of radiotherapy, daily monthly blood transfusions at the hospital for three years, I have also faced extensive restrictions in my daily life to keeping my social distance and maintaining a lockdown in the home for nine months annually over each of the past eight years. And yet, I would not swap my life today, for any part of life I previously experienced for all the tea in China.

In my 78th year of life, I have finally realised that each part and period of my life has been experienced by me for a purpose. Even the experience of my extensive pain in my earlier life has provided me with a high pain level threshold today, which has been of itself, lifesaving during some operations I have had over the years when I have seriously faced death.

However strange it probably seems to any outsider I feel more loved at this moment in time than any man has ever felt or has a right to feel on this side of the grave. Over the past eight years, I have had more prayers and masses said on my behalf, and candles lit by people all over the world; each one giving me continual comfort and reassurance in my efforts to make this final voyage of mine last as long as possible before landing me on the shores of a pain-free and promised land.

When my time eventually arrives, I will sail into the eternal sunset knowing that I loved and was loved in return by my wife, family, friends, neighbours, and one-time strangers turned friends. No more can any man ask for! I appreciate all my life experiences to the extent that no amount of expressed gratitude given by me to my Maker could ever prove sufficient.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 19th March 2021

19/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to four Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish a happy birthday to Mary Ryan who originates from Tipperary, Ireland but who now lives in London, England: Claire Brierley who lives in Haworth, West Yorkshire: Josephine Dunne who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. We also wish Mark Foreman a happy birthday. Enjoy your special day, Mary, Claire, Josephine, and Mark. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Blue Skies’. This popular song was written by Irvin Berlin in 1926. The song was composed in 1926 as a last-minute addition to the Rodgers and Hart musical ‘Betsy’. Although the show ran for only 39 performances, ‘Blue Skies’ was an instant success, with audiences on opening night demanding 24 encores of the piece from star Belle Baker. During the final repetition, Ms. Baker forgot her lyrics, prompting Berlin to sing them from his seat in the front row. In1927, the music was published, and during that same year it became one of the first songs to be featured in a talking movie when Al Jolson performed it in ‘The Jazz Singer’. The song was recorded for all the major and dime store labels of the time.

Notable others to record and cover the song included Benny Goodman and his Orchestra: Bing Crosby: Count Basie: and Willie Nelson (my favourite recording of the song).

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We associate blue skies with fine days and good prospects. Because grey clouds hang heavy with the prospect of miserable weather, blue skies seem to represent a better day ahead. What better vista of nature is there for a summer stroller on a fine afternoon walking the countryside than his own blue sky above, and his own green land all around. While the woodland in the distance beckons the walker on towards the cool stream that meanders through its centre as it washes the small stones embedded in the earth beneath its watery coat, the clear blue skies above herald a glorious day ahead.

Some of my youthful years that I spent learning to walk again after a bad traffic accident, was spent during warm summer afternoons walking to ‘Bluebell Wood’ about two miles away from our council house on Windybank Estate where I grew up. There was a three-year period in my life between the ages of 11-14 years when I had been unable to walk because of a damaged spine I incurred when a wagon knocked me down and ran over me. The one discipline that helped me the most at this critical stage of life was learning meditation methods and relaxation training. Relaxation Training helped me to mediate and cope with high levels of body pain that I would experience for the rest of my life.

Relaxation Training and Transcendental Meditation became the bedrock and foundation of my road away from a life of ‘learned helplessness' after being medically told that I would never walk again after I had damaged my spine. The wagon wrapped me around its main drive propellor shaft beneath its undercarriage, leaving the bone structure of my legs and torso in a mangled mess. However, it was imagination exercises: the power of positive thinking: learning the crucial importance of positive self-talk: the significance of belief systems: adopting the correct breathing pattern and body posture dependent upon the activity undertaken: and learning about the brain/muscle connections that helped me to walk again. All these combined disciplines gave me a renewed purpose in my life. They also enabled me to help thousands of people with too much stress, anger, and fear in them, and too many problems to cope with during later years of my working life.

When I arrived at Bluebell Woods during these young years of improving my walking, I would make my way up toward its centre, where a large oak tree stood. At its base, the oak tree was surrounded by an area of soft, lush grass and scattered wildflowers. There, I would lay at the base of the oak tree and look up into the clear blue sky above peeping through the top of the tree branches. For an hour or more I would frequently relax in the warmth of the afternoon beneath my oak tree, where I would do my breathing exercises, my muscle tensing and release exercises and my imagination exercises. As I relaxed, I could hear the nearby woodland stream and birds tweeting, along with other creatures like squirrels rustling through the leaves and branches of nearby trees. My body would gradually wind down until it seemed to sink into the ground upon which I lay, melting my very being with nature itself. I would invariably fall asleep, and when I woke up, I would feel totally refreshed.

Over the years that followed, I would become one of the leading authorities in the country on the discipline of Relaxation Training, having practiced it for 67 years since the age of 11 years and having been a Relaxation Training Instructor for 50 years. I would later make a Relaxation Training Tape which was freely given to over 10,000 people since 1970 to help them both change their behaviour and to assist them in pain reduction and to assist poor sleeping practices. The scene used in my Relaxation tape would be of the Bluebell Wood to which I travelled regularly as a young teenager regaining my walking ability. Anyone wanting to access the tape free, plus other Relaxation information please access. Please note that people with brain damage are not advised to use the tape:
http://www.fordefables.co.uk/relax-with-bill.html

The above account is how I managed to turn my grey skies into blue skies.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 18th March 2021

18/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to five Facebook friends of mine who celebrate their birthday today. We wish happy birthday to Michelle Stubbs who comes from Tipperary but who now lives in Waterford, Ireland. Michelle has a double celebration of her birthday and wedding anniversary today. Enjoy your special day, Michelle.

We also wish a happy birthday to Christian Scott Mitchell who lives in Keighley, West Yorkshire, England: Evelyn Brogan who lives in Carlow, Ireland: Sindy Morris who lives in Wexford, Ireland: Patricia Pickup who lives in Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire. Patricia (known as Patsy) attended the same school as me and my siblings and was the fastest athlete in the’ St. Patrick’s Catholic School’. No male ever proved fast enough to catch her; unless, of course, she wanted to be caught! Christian, Evelyn, Sindy, and Patricia, enjoy your special day, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Penny Lover’. This the title of the fifth and final single released from Lionel Richie’s multi-platinum and Grammy Award-winning 1983 album, ‘Can’t Slow Down’. The song was written by Richie and his then-wife, Brenda Harvey Richie. This song is another of his unfailingly effective ballads that have universal appeal.

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I remember once being told a story which I was never quite sure if it was true or not. Nevertheless, it remained memorable enough to instantly recall when I was recently singing today’s song. If I remember, I heard the story during the 1980s, when a group of Probation Officers was discussing in a pub one evening about the small denominational value of one penny, and the merits of still retaining penny pieces in our currency today. Many of us were able to remember being able to buy something for one penny when we were children back in the 1940s and 1950s.

The occasion involved a close group of friends saying farewell to a retiring colleague who could not stand the traditional office party farewell dos, so a dozen of us met up in a local Huddersfield pub called 'The Sportsman' instead. One of the group mentioned that however small in value one penny was, she would not object to having a million of them. Another person in the group reminded us of the old proverb of all money people, ‘Look after your pennies, and your pounds will take care of themselves.'

The conversation then turned to playfully discovering what anyone would possibly be prepared to do for one penny after another group member quipped, “I’ll give you a penny for your thoughts!” Now, that suggestion appealed to me. I said that a penny would be a small price to pay for the thoughts of another at specific times in one’s life. Imagine knowing the precise thoughts of a member of the opposite sex you really fancied? It would also be nice to know what someone else was thinking about you as they interviewed you for a job or a university place, and were weighing up your potential?

The conversation in the pub tended to get more outrageous the more that was imbibed as the evening advanced. The high point of the social gathering was when one group member invited us all to declare ‘what we had ever done for the price of one penny in our wicked past?’ There were a few incidents the group related that merited a laugh. There was also some embarrassment when one male member of the group changed the question to “But, what would you be prepared to do for one penny today?”. The only gay in the social gathering readily replied, “With you, darling, anything!” I remember this colleague being disliked by some stuffy office colleagues for his homosexuality, and respected by the group of office colleagues he was with that night because he had the courage to 'come out of the closet' while other gays were hiding their skeletons in theirs at the time.

However, the best tale of all that evening was told by a group member called Penny. Penny indicated that the girl in the story shared the same Christian name as herself but had been born twenty-five years before her.

The tale told concerned a young precocious girl called 'Penny' who had not yet reached the age of thirteen years before her poverty of circumstances drove her to extreme lengths. Penny came from a large and poor family. Her parents, whose household expenditure always exceeded household income, were never able to give their children any spending money. The time was said to be sometime during the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and before the ‘Second World War’. A few of us probably wondered as our colleague Penny was telling the story, whether she was talking about herself and had set the story in an earlier time to throw us off the scent of what it was that she had done during her own childhood years to earn a penny.

The one thing 12-year-old Penny had going for her was her good looks. She was physically well developed for her age, and she looked to be around 15 years old. She stood about five feet four inches tall and was the most sought-after girl at her mixed school with her male classmates; all of whom wanted to call her their girlfriend. Penny also discovered as she grew into puberty, that her Lolita-like features provided her with a more seductive image that was an added interest to the older male.

The time eventually arrived when Penny began to realise that she possessed something of value that most males appreciated. It was something that she was able to put a price on, something that would earn her the spending money that her parents could never afford to give her weekly. Her collective assets involved the combination of her age, her attractiveness of form, her innocence in matters of the adult world, and a precociousness which also drew extra appeal. Penny was said to have developed the art of saying the simplest things in the most seductive of ways, and she consciously displayed an innocence of character; a trait which she had lost almost as soon as she had discovered it in herself.

It was during the twelfth year of her life when Penny began a business side-line on school grounds. When the school bell rang to signal the end of the school day, Penny would hang back until the pupils had passed through the school gates to make their way home. A few of the older boys in the class above her (13 and 14-year-olds) in their desire to add to their biological learning, would form a small queue to see Penny after school at the bottom of the schoolyard. After the bell had gone, the older boys would slink down towards the outside toilets and bike shed at the bottom of the playground. According to the narrator, each boy would be holding one penny piece which they would give to Penny in turn, in exchange for ‘one look’.

Penny would be wearing a dress, but she would not be wearing any knickers beneath her dress. The routine never varied. She would stretch out her left hand as she stood inside the toilet cubicle and the boy would place his penny in it. As he did so, with her right hand, Penny would simultaneously, and hurriedly, raise her dress up high enough for him to see; providing he was quick enough before the hemline of her frock fell back down to earth. It was what one might call a ‘fleeting flash’ instead of a ‘good gander'.

While listening to the tale, my mind immediately went to the bedroom scene in the 1967 American romantic comedy film ‘The Graduate’. In the film, Benjamin Braddock (played by a young Dustin Hoffman) has been tricked into fetching some item from his neighbour's bedroom by her. Whilst in her bedroom, the older woman, Mrs. Robinson (played by Ann Bancroft), with whom he would start an affair enters, stark naked. As Mrs. Robinson stands inside the bedroom totally naked, the film producer's camera focuses upon the eyes of the graduate, Benjamin, as he gawps in disbelief at the vision before him. As to what the eagerly awaited cinema-goers manage to see of the naked Mrs. Robinson, they got no more than the quickest flash of womanhood that even the slowest blink of an eye would fail to register. I very much suspect that the13 or 14 years old boys in the 1930s, being given the quickest flash of Penny’s budding womanhood could not possibly have seen anymore in their day than the cinema-goers of 1967 saw of Mrs Robinson in ‘The Graduate’ during mine!

In fact, I heard of many young teenagers in 1967 who went to watch ‘The Graduate’ several times in a futile attempt to see what they had missed seeing of Mrs. Robinson the first time around! I wonder if any of the young schoolboys who would spend a penny at the end of their school day during the 1930s were also foolish enough to keep paying the required admission fee for Penny to flash them again, in the forlorn hope that one afternoon the swiftness of her hand movement might falter as she raised and lowered her dress? Or perhaps, Penny went on to marry a well-to-do husband called Mr. Robinson in her later life? Who knows which way the wheel of life turns for each of us?

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 17th March 2021

17/3/2021

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WISHING YOU ALL A HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY FROM BILL AND SHEILA

I dedicate today’s song to five Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish a happy birthday and a happy St. Patrick’s Day to Jenny Kearns who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Eleanor Falvey who lives in Piltown. Kilkenny, Ireland: Milford Strongstream who lives in Carlow, Ireland: Cameron Poole who lives in Hobart, Tasmania: Paul Wilson who lives in Haworth, West Yorkshire.

Sheila and I also want to wish a happy St. Patrick’s Day to my best friend and allotment buddy Brian Moorehouse and his lovely wife V’ron. This couple has been the best of neighbours and friends to us, over the past decade, and Brian is constantly helping me do jobs up at the allotment which I am no longer able to do myself. V’ron and all her family come from the old country of Ireland and love a good old Irish song and a drop of the hard stuff.

My song today is ’Forty Shades of Green’. This song about Ireland was written and first performed by American country singer Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash wrote the song in 1959 while on a trip to Ireland.

‘Forty Shades of Green’ has also been recorded by Daniel O’Donnell: Foster and Allen: Roger Whittaker and Ruby Murray, among others.

Irish guitarist Gary Moore quotes the song in the title track of his 1987 album ‘Wild Frontier’ as a reference to a once innocent Ireland ‘before the wars began.

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This song reminds me of my dear late father. When he came to West Yorkshire, England with his growing family (of which I am the oldest of seven children} in the mid-1940s, all his previous experiences had been in Ireland. He was Irish through and through and he only had one colour. His colour was ‘green’, the only colour that all citizens of the Emerald Isle are born to love.

I recall when we started living in our newly built council house on Windybank Estate in Liversedge, West Yorkshire that we were issued with a booklet from the council that contained certain rules of what tenants could not do to change the uniform outer appearance of their property. One of the rules was not keeping hens or any other poultry in one’s garden. Having bred hens for years, dad was greatly put out by that rule. We’d always kept hens since we first arrived in England. Dad did this to ensure that our family had fresh eggs during a time when the country was still subject to war rationing on certain foodstuff which included fresh eggs. Most of the country ate powdered eggs while we still had the occasional fresh egg topping. Dad got the full boiled egg, and his three oldest children would be left to argue for who got the top of his egg. Being the firstborn and the male, I usually won out. My hardest task was to persuade my father to neatly cut off the top of the egg instead of bashing it with a spoon.

Another council rule was that no tenant could repaint their house door as the colour of all council property doors on each avenue of the estate was a standardised shitty brown. This rule was one step too far for my father, and as soon as we moved in, he painted the front door dark green, along with the window frames around the house. The council eventually obliged him to have it repainted the standard colour of ‘shitty brown’ as my mother called it. However, what colours one had inside a council house was not regulated. Walls were either papered or painted and floors were either left bare and mopped daily or covered in lino. Only rich people carpeted their floors.

Determined to exercise whatever freedom he could, my father painted everything that was made of either metal or wood inside our house, green. Nothing seemed safe from dad’s paintbrush, and if it could be covered in a shade of green, then green it would be painted. I cannot recall if dad painted the wooden bedstead top and base, but I know that all the inner doors were painted green, all the cupboards, the larder shelves, the kitchen table, the wooden windowsills, and one or two walls. Even the wood casing of the old wireless (radio) we listened to was painted in an Irish shade of green.

Dad had never brought up to be a handyman or accomplished decorator about the home. If he put up a shelf, it would usually fall down as soon as a few pots and pans had been placed on it. When he painted, he never had the smoothness of brushstroke to avoid splashing everywhere. He had been reared in a poor family and left school to join the workforce two years earlier than he should have done, to help out the family. His only skill and adroitness of foot was seen when he played football. He was good enough to play for his home county, County Kilkenny, as well as going on to play soccer for the Irish national squad for a brief period. Any finesse dad ever displayed was seen in him kicking a football, not wielding a paintbrush! He was a poor painter (mum called him a splasher), and despite him being an industrious man his brushstrokes with a paintbrush were invariably wider than the width of any frame he painted and left much to be desired. He could never paint the window frames inside the house without catching the glass windowpane also. When dad painted the radio (which was intricate to say the least) he finished up getting green paint spots on the dial cover where we would tune in the various stations. For the whole of my life, I could never see the dial sufficiently well enough to get Radio Luxembourg, as the precise spot to tune in was located somewhere beneath some green paint spots!

I recall that the few activities my father engaged in was walking, cycling to work on his green-painted bike, and cutting the green lawn and the perimeter green hedges at home. In later years, uniformity gave way to individuality, and the council eventually allowed tenants to paint their outside door fronts, the colour of their choice. I don’t think I ever again say an outside front door on Windybank council estate painted a ‘shitty brown’. Naturally, dad lost no time and within a few days of the previous colour restrictions being relaxed, our front door and window frames colour-matched the other forty shades of green that could be seen in the lawn, hedge surround, cabbage plot, plant life and inside the house. Until my parents moved into a smaller council flat in later life, after all of their seven children had married and left home, our house on Windybank Estate remained forevermore green.

For ten years before he died, my father cut the grass at the Catholic Church he attended in Cleckheaton. Dad was the religious type, whereas mum never observed Holy Days after she left her parent’s house to get married to dad. Going to church once a week was often enough for mum, and the only times she would attend church outside a Sunday service was for family weddings, baptisms, First Communions and Confirmation services. Dad cut the church grass like he cut his hair, cropped short! He would cycle to the church three times weekly to cut the grass for free. Mum always thought he should have charged the church for his grass cutting labours and would chide him that he was doing it as a penance for past sins he’d committed. I can still hear her tell him, “No matter how many times a week you cut the old grass at church, Paddy, you won’t get into heaven any sooner!”

When dad passed away, I almost ordered him a green coffin to be buried in, but wisely refrained from doing so. Going through his belongings after his death is a necessary task to help in the process of healthy bereavement. We occasionally came across some of the clothes he wore about the house during the week that had the obligatory spot of green paint on them! Dad had one good jacket and one pair of trousers, and one pair of brown shoes that he only wore whenever he went to church services, funerals, and weddings. I never saw him in a suit or ina black pair of shoes.
No prizes for guessing what my favourite colour has been ever since the day I was born? Why, green of course! What other colour could there possibly be for an Irishman? Love you dad. Your oldest child, Billy xxx

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 16th March 2021

16/3/2021

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Please note that my written post is very long today as it contains a few of my mother's Irish stories she told me as a young boy.

I dedicate today’s song to four Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today, and one person who celebrates her wedding anniversary. I wish a happy birthday to my niece, Alex, who lives in London: Pauline Wall, and Nikki O’Neill who comes from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Linda O’Shea who lives in Piltown, Kilkenny, Ireland. We also wish a happy wedding anniversary to Michelle Stubbs who comes from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary but who now lives in Waterford, Ireland.

My song today is ‘Fairytale’. This song was introduced on the May 1974 album release ‘That’s a Plenty’ by the Pointer Sisters. It was written by group members, Anita Pointer and Bonnie Pointer. ‘Fairytale’ became the second of the three Top 40 hits scored by the Pointer Sisters in their original embodiment as a quartet, and Anita Pointer would sing lead on all three of these hits.

Anita Pointer has stated that she wrote this ‘breakup’ song from personal experience. In her pre-stardom days, Anita had become romantically involved with a man who had neglected to mention being married. She said, "He lied to me, and when I found out that's when that song took shape”.

‘Fairytale’ was an extreme stylistic departure for the Pointer Sisters. The song achieved moderate C&W hit status, peaking at Number 39 on the ‘Billboard C&W’ chart on October 5, 1974, but this was sufficient success to effect a crossover to Pop radio with the song debuting on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart. It eventually ascended to a Number 13 peak that December. Internationally ‘Fairytale’ reached Number 21 in Australia and Number 42 in Canada. It also hit Number 41 on the Canadian C&W chart.

'Fairytale’ went on to win the Pointer Sisters the ‘Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group’ for the year 1974, marking the first awarding of a Grammy to an all-female vocal group, and Bonnie and Anita Pointer also received a nomination for the Grammy Award for 'Best Country Song’ as the writers of ‘Fairytale’. Elvis Presley also recorded a cover version of the song in March 1975.

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We are all lied to occasionally, even by those closest to us on occasions. It is true that some deceptions will amount to no more than harmless white lies, told to preserve our feelings. On other occasions, we will be told whoppers to throw us off the scent of the truth completely. Some people will lie to varnish their employment capabilities on their C.V. when applying for another job, and other people may lie to disguise past truths which might embarrass them if they were ever to see the light of day. Given the social increase in ‘dating on line’ that has overtaken society during the past decade, I am sure that much of the details on a member’s profile is inaccurate, especially profile photograph likenesses that were taken five or ten years earlier before you lost all your teeth or hair and gained a few stones in weight.

I am sure that my dearly departed mother told me grossly exaggerated stories when I was growing up during the late 1940s and 1950s. There were no televisions in working-class homes then, and the prime entertainment which one did not make themselves came from the wireless (radio), which the family mighty huddle around on an evening to hear another adventure of ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’ or blood-curdling stories from ‘The Black Museum’. The former wireless programme was about the adventures of a ‘World War 2’ veteran, turned crimefighter, Dick Barton, and his sidekicks, Snowey and Jock. The latter was a radio crime-drama programme produced in London. I can still recall being huddled around an old radio and waiting for the broadcaster to announce the commencement of this week’s gruesome story with the words, ‘This is Orson Wells from London’ as the chimes of Big Ben struck in the background. Too often I went to bed scared witless, and had nightmares afterward about the telling of some sinister murder, with particular detail given to the gruesome murder weapon/method used on the victim.

After my discharge from Batley Hospital during my twelfth year of life, unable to stand or walk after a serious traffic accident and multiple operations, I missed between one and two years’ schooling, I would often stay up late and talk to mum at the end of the day when the rest of the household was asleep in bed, as mum ironed clothes for use the following day, or darned some holed socks for the following day.. My father would always be in bed before 10:00 pm as he would start his 6:00 am shift as a miner underground the following day. Dad and the milkman got up on a morning around the same time as the rest of the country slept soundly in their beds, so early nights were a necessity. Both would have been working two hours before the ordinary worker stumbled out of bed at the start of their day.

These late hours spent with mum on a night was my most treasured time of all I spent with her. As the hour advanced towards midnight, mum’s tongue would loosen, and she would start to reveal all manner of things that few mothers and sons would ever talk about. Having been born the oldest of seven children, I always had this closeness of bond with my mother, and there was literally no topic of conversation that either of us would consider being ‘out of bounds' as far as the discussion went. I also felt our relationship to be more special than my six siblings shared with mum, whether that was true or merely a figment of my imagination. During such occasions, my mum would tell me tales about the ‘old country’ in Ireland where I’d been born but had left when I was aged 4 years. I loved to hear such tales, and whether true or false, elaborated, embroidered, or simply fabricated by mum, I would be spellbound listening to them. I dearly wanted the stories which mum told me to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so it naturally pleased me to initially regard the facts she related as being Gospel!

Mum was a natural storyteller, and I now wonder if she ever knew what she was going to say before her mouth had formed her spoken words. I loved my mum to bits, but I knew her as being a bit of a romancer wherever the finer details of a situation were concerned. Whether true or false, in either part or whole, I loved listening to her description of Portlaw Village where I was born in the front room of my grandparent’s house at 14, William Street. I could not get enough of it.

Mum told me many outrageous tales that fascinated my young ears and placed my imagination into overdrive, as she spoke about some of the Irish characters who were part of the village community. There was one tale so common, that it is heard in every Irish household all over the world, every day of the week. The ‘teller’ of the tale is an Irish mother, who was the firstborn in a family of many siblings. The most important thing all non-Irish should understand is ‘the special place’ within the family setting which is traditionally occupied by the oldest daughter. Being the firstborn to their parents endows her with the additional role of a ‘little mammy’ until the day she gets married and leaves the parental abode. In short, this additional family role corresponds with the extra work she will be expected to do by all of her family and the additional daily responsibilities she will have to discharge to those of her younger siblings. I refer to having to rise before 6:00 am on a winter’s morning, before walking a six-mile return journey to fetch a bucket of milk from some dairy farmer in the next county. And it does not end when she arrives back home with the pale of milk. ‘Little Mamma’ has to make up the fire and warming the kitchen for the rest of the household to get up to. Only when she has set the table with a loaf of bread and a dish of butter and heated the first kettle of water on the range, can she consider her morning chores done. Only then can the oldest daughter get dressed into her school clothes and rush to school before the class register is called, or get a whacking from the teacher/nun!

The stories about Portlaw that my mum told me, kept my Irishness alive in me, even though I had lived in a foreign country called England since the age of 4 years. Some stories mum told, were never forgotten by me. There was the tale about the alleged indiscretions of some Irish priests who took her confession. Mum told me that it would have been far more interesting had she’d heard their sins being confessed instead of listening to hers. My mum told me about a handsome Irish priest who would leave his walking stick outside the front door of any parishioner’s house he visited in the village. Anyone seeing the priest’s walking stick standing by the door outside knew not to interrupt the priestly caller by entering the house while he was inside. Naturally, the villagers gossiped about what the priest might be getting up to inside, especially after it had been widely observed by many a good God-fearing Catholic that he only visited the attractive female parishioners, and when their husbands were at work. Not once was he known to enter the home of any unattractive woman, or any woman aged 40 or over!

Then, there was naturally the story of the novice nuns, who after adopting their latest habit could not find it within themselves to dispense with any other worldly habits which brought them immense pleasure of the flesh. I heard about some unusual penances given to the novice nuns whenever the parish priest heard their private confessions. Of course, there were also the stories about cruel nuns who taught in the schools and who derived great pleasure caning their pupils on their bare bottoms.

In Portlaw, the main employer of the village was the Tannery. Almost everyone in Portlaw who worked there worked at the Tannery at the top of the square. Every Friday was payday at the Tannery and if the men’s wives did not relieve their husbands of their wage packets as soon as they came through the Tannery gates into the square, many knew that some of their much-needed cash would be passed over the counter of the nearest pub before the worker came home to his wife and family. Any man who could get away with it made a beeline for the pub as soon as he left work. The only way to intercede in this pub tradition on a wage day was to be outside the Tannery gate as one’s husband walked through the gates and remove the inevitable temptation from him.

Mum told me about one man who worked in the town tannery, who for £5 wager, walked out of the gates of his works on a wage day at 5:00pm when the hooter went off, into a crowded square of women waiting to collar their husbands and get their household money off him before he drank it all! “Why should he win a £5 bet for doing that?” I asked my mother incredulously; not realising she was merely setting me up. “Oh, he didn’t win £5 for walking out the Tannery gates, Billy,” mum said smilingly, adding, “ He won his wager because the only stitch of clothes he was wearing was one short shirt that did not come down beyond his waist.” Instead of telling me the story’s punchline straight away, my chain-smoking mum would light up another fag and take half a dozen puffs of it before continuing. She was undoubtedly a mistress of suspense. To win his bet and save his shame, the man wearing only the short shirt and showing all of his manhood walked out the Tannery gates with his shirt pulled over his face so that no one but his wife would know his identity!

One of mum’s stories that was a firm favourite of mine concerned a retired Headmaster who was never seen without a cane in his hand. He carried his cane with pride and boasted that there was not a man in Portlaw who he had not thrashed at least once. When the cruel Headmaster retired, still needing to be the ‘top dog’ in Portlaw, and liking gardening, he started growing onions which he entered at the ‘Waterford Show’ year after year. He won with the largest onion, the first time he ever entered the ‘Waterford Show’, and every year after for a decade, he beat every contestant across Ireland with his huge prize onions. Each time he went to the pub, he would boast of being the best man in Portlaw and the best onion grower in the whole of Ireland.

Naturally, my mother was the only person ever to discover the secret of his giant-sized onions after she followed him up to his allotments one day. Apparently, he had an old donkey which he would beat daily until it urinated on his onion bed, and apparently, the donkey piss produced the largest onions Ireland had ever seen! According to my mum, it was a secret that was now known to only her and myself, as the onion grower took his secret to the grave with him. When I enquired about the nature of his demise, mum said that his death was totally unexpected. On the day he died, he had been beating his old donkey as usual until the ass urinated over the onion plot. Then, after his donkey had finished, his owner walked behind the beast. The donkey was less of an ass than its owner, and after seeing an opportunity to end the daily beatings there and then, the donkey took it! The cruel owner was about to cane the ass on its ass again, but being right-handed he needed to walk to the donkey’s left flank to wield his cane at full force. As he walked around the rear of the donkey, the donkey lashed out with his hind hoofs, making contact with the retired Headmaster’s skull which was instantly cracked open. The unfortunate incident was later discovered after the retired headmaster failed to return home from the allotments. He was found dead on the ground and there was a strong smell of donkey piss all over his body. The old ass was having a loud laugh nearby as it brayed away contentedly!

Whether or not my mother told the truth, a part of the truth, or none of it, I will never know for certain. These were just a few of the tales she would tell me on a night-time as she completed her daily chores as wife and mother of seven children. In later years, after my mother died, I became an established author and had over sixty books published. By the time I had met my wife, Sheila, in 2010, I had put down my pen, but she persuaded me to take it back up and to write some more stories. I decided that I would take the germ of my mother’s tales about my Irish homeland, and with a bit of poetic embroidery and artistic licence, I wrote Irish romantic stories, based around the village of Portlaw, County Waterford.

Since 2010, I have written and had published another fourteen novels of a romantic nature. The stories are called ‘Tales from Portlaw’ and can be purchased in either e-book format or hard copy from amazon or any other main publisher. All profits from their sales will be given to charitable causes in perpetuity. Should you be unable to afford the modest price of these books and wish to read them all for free, they are available on my website www.fordefables.co.uk under the ‘Tales from Portlaw’ section.
I first started writing books in 1990, and I have never taken one penny profit from this labour of love. All book-sale profits have always been given to charitable causes, and by 2003, over two hundred thousand pounds ((£200,000) had been given to charity. Any profits from future book sales will witness free books being given to children. We do not physically promote book sales anymore, as the books are there today for future access when the time arrives that I no longer am. There is also a section on my website which tells you all of the book themes of every book I have ever written, and the appropriate reading ages that the book was written for. I have written for children: young person: adults: strictly adults.

Love and peace Bill xxx


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Song For Today: 15th March 2021

15/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to three Facebook friends. We wish a happy birthday to Steven Spencer who lives in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, England: Richard Dalton who lives in Klagenfurt, Austria: Dianne Benn who lives in Haworth, West Yorkshire, England. Steven, Richard, and Dianne, we hope that you enjoy your special day. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Singing the Blues’. This song was written by Melvyn Endsley and published in 1956. The song was first recorded and released by Marty Robbins in 1956. It is not related to the 1920 jazz song of the same name that was recorded in 1927.

The best-known recording was released in October 1956 by Guy Mitchell and spent ten weeks at number 1 on the U.S. ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart. Mitchell's version was also Number 1 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’ in early 1957. It is one of only four singles to rise to the top spot on the chart on three separate occasions.

Marty Robbins and Tommy Steele versions were released almost simultaneously with Guy Mitchell's. Tommy Steele's version of "Singing the Blues" made Number 1 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’ in 1957, sandwiched by two of the weeks that Guy Mitchell's version of the same song topped the charts. Steele's recording of the song was not a chart success in the US. The song is often revived, and on three occasions new recordings of ‘Singing the Blues’ have become UK Top 40 hits.

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My first hearing of this song was the versions by Guy Mitchell and Tommy Steele. When I was 15 years old, I left school to start work in a Cleckheaton mill. I wanted to get some money in my pockets for once in my life, and after having had numerous operations between 11-14 years, I just wanted to get a bit of fun back in my life.

I was a highly intelligent young man who had experienced sufficient difficulty being unable to walk between the ages of 11 and 14 years (following a bad traffic accident). I abandoned my education after returning to school after a two-year absence, and I was still finding my feet as I entered my first job in the workplace for two pounds and fifteen shillings a week for forty hours in January 1958.

Being a bobbin boy in the mill represented a wonderful start to my working experiences, and it provided a solid bedrock for my future employment experiences. The first thing I learned about mill workers who labour for a modest wage, was that their poverty of monetary expectation generated in them a need to have as much fun as they could, every day they started work. I never knew one day pass in the mill when a joke was not being played on one person or another and harmless merriment was not being had by someone.

All the new boys received their textile baptism by their male and female workmates during their first few weeks at work. Male workmates would send the new boy off on useless errands as they laughed at their gullibility. The new bobbin boys would be sent to collect a glass hammer or a round nut from the mechanics in the maintenance department. The women in the weaving shed, however, were less generous in their baptism ritual with the new lad, and the first time a new boy walked through the weaving shed, they would be pulled to the ground by a dozen frustrated female workers and stripped naked as they attempted to wriggle free from the women’s clutches. As the new mill boys were being ravaged and stripped, a few of the bolder female weavers would pull their ‘todger’ to test their reaction. I asked afterward why the women engaged in this sexual assault on new boys. The answer I got back was to estimate what they could expect if they ever went with you a few years down the line? After the new boy had undergone their weaver’s shed baptism, the women’s main topic of conversation for the rest of that day would involve the size of the new boy’s budding manhood.

Each year, the mill would have a day trip to Blackpool. These trips were ideal opportunities for young lads to have their first pint of beer ensconced in the corner of a Blackpool pub, and depending upon how good-looking the young men were, there was also the opportunity to sit with an older female on the bus journey home. Let me say, that for the purpose of the Blackpool Mill trip, no married woman ever alighted the bus when it arrived in Blackpool, wearing her wedding ring (which conveniently found a temporary resting place in the female’s purse). As for telling tales about the Blackpool exploits of any passenger that day, the golden rule was one of selective silence and total discretion. While mill workers who were passengers on the day trip to Blackpool would naturally speak among themselves about ‘goings on’ that day, any news of whatever happened on the day trip never reached the ears of mill workers who had not gone on the coach outing. All day-trippers understood, ‘what happens on the annual Blackpool trip stays in Blackpool!’ Mill workers who did not observe that rule would not be allowed on any future seaside outings and would be shunned by their workmates.

On the way back home from Blackpool, all bus passengers would be merry, to say the least. The coach journey would take around three hours, and the driver would turn off all the inner lights after he'd stopped the coach at the first watering hole. This stopping point usually came in the form of a grass verge that both males and females shared in the dark of night. Some males and females would bring a torch with them, and often quite a bit of flashing among giggles would be common.

At the time, I had a good voice, and I had won many singing contests since the age of 8 years. I would be pleased to sing for the coachload of mill passengers, given the additional perks. It usually enabled me to share a seat on the way home with a female who was older than me but younger than twenty-one. As most of the female mill workers were inebriated, my young age of 15/16 years would be ‘temporarily overlooked’ on the journey back home. Along with being serenaded, my female seat passenger might forgo any inhibitions she would normally have when sober about sitting next to a ‘toy boy’. Over the remaining journey home in the unlit coach, because of the darkness, nobody knew above speculation what was taking place in the seats in front, behind, or to the side of them. I will never forget one of three Blackpool mill trips I went on when my female seat passenger on the way home started interacting with me as though I was two or three years older than I was!

As previously stated, what happened on the Blackpool day out, stayed on the Lancashire side of the border where it happened! Almost everyone on the Blackpool trip had a vested interest in keeping all the events of the day away from the ears and prying attention of the other Yorkshire mill workers, especially the married women who removed their wedding rings for the day, to replace on their fingers as they arrived home. It was often rumoured that their wedding rings were not the only items they might have removed from their person that day as they had fun and games down at the Pleasure Beach, or strolled beneath the pier on the sands, or socialised with day-trippers from other parts of the country in the pubs and Working Men Clubs during the evening! To have news of their day’s activities in the Lancashire seaside town reach the ears of their family and friends back home in Yorkshire would undoubtedly start another ‘War of the Roses’ within many married households.

I would have to acknowledge that there might be a number of blushed faces the next time some male who had been on the Blackpool mill trip went through the weaver’s shed. They were liable to be joked about as one female yelled out to another workmate “Is it worth us giving him another baptism yet, Mary to see how he’s coming on?”. This private joke between several female passengers of the Blackpool trip who worked in the weaving might cause a bit of speculative gossip between the rest of the weavers during their rest period, but it was harmless fun of the times I grew up in.

I will end today’s post by saying that once I experienced the additional benefits that being able to sing could get me during the return journey home from our Blackpool day out, I was determined to retain my singing voice under all circumstances. In fact, had I been unable to sing for toffee, the sheer attractiveness of many young women weavers, would have been a sufficient inducement for me to instantly take up singing lessons! You must bear in mind that I was still an impressionable 15/16-year-old boy with virgin credentials who was on the threshold of adult discovery. What a wonderful stage in my life this time was.

I know that many people knock the seaside town of Blackpool today as being a sandless wasteland which is now scattered with once splendid sea-front hotels that the new homeless claimants on DHSS housing benefit now occupy in their thousands. But it was not always so, and I was fortunate to know a much different Blackpool than the Blackpool that exists today. The Blackpool of my youth was an overcrowded, busy, and bustling seaside town, filled with floating music in the salty sea air, the calciferous sound of busy slot machines operating, visitors with buried faces in pink fluffy candy floss on a stick, and the permanent aroma of fish and chips being sold somewhere nearby.

This was an exciting Blackpool that I knew in its hay day of the late 1950s, when, as a 16-year-old mill worker on a day trip I enjoyed my first pint of Lancashire beer, and had my first real snog which instead of ending in a sloppy kiss went on to a much wider experience; something far more exciting. For a 16-year-old lad on the ride home at the end of the day, nestled alongside an older woman who was determined that I’d have a journey home that I’d never forget, life did not come any more exciting!

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 14th March 2021

14/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to five people who celebrate their birthday today. They are Kevin Quinlan who comes from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland but who currently lives in the Bronx, America: Sinead Power and Michelle Murphy who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Andrew Donnelly who lives in Dublin, Ireland: Matty Waters who comes from Dublin but who now lives in County Tipperary, Ireland. Kevin, Sinead, Michelle, Andrew, and Matty, enjoy your special day, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Southern Nights’. This song was written and recorded by Allen Toussaint, from his 1975 album, ‘Southern Nights’. It was later recorded by American country singer Glen Campbell. It reached Number 1 on three separate US charts.

The lyrics of ‘Southern Nights’ were inspired by childhood memories that Allen Toussaint had of visiting relatives in the Louisiana backwoods, which often entailed storytelling under star-filled night-time skies. When Campbell heard Toussaint's version, he immediately identified with the lyrics which reminded him of his own youth growing up on an Arkansas farm. In October 1976, Campbell recorded the song with slightly modified lyrics.

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Although I lived in Canada and travelled around some of the U.S.A during 1964/65, I never managed to get to the southern shores. I would often hear about the humidity and unbearable heat of southern summer nights from people who either had lived or currently lived in South America when they stayed at the hotel where I worked in upper Toronto, Canada.

More than once, I was told that it got so hot during the summer nights that people in the southern states always slept naked and would sometimes run around outside naked to cool off. I was even told about the ‘flappers’ down in Louisiana. These were women of the 1960s from Louisiana who had reached that stage of life where women are invariably plagued with hot flushes. I was told that the ‘flappers’ could be often seen by prying neighbours at their back door. The ‘flappers’ would be wearing a loose dress and no underwear and using their hands like the wings of a waddling penguin in a flapping movement of their dresses. Whereas the penguins of the Antarctic would flap their wings vigorously in the bitter cold of their winters to keep warm, the flappers of South Carolina and Louisiana would flap their loose dresses back and forth with both hands wafting to bring cool refreshing air up towards their female undercarriage region.

Initially, when I was told this story, I was not sure how exaggerated it was being relayed to me, but after hearing numerous accounts of a similar nature I became more persuaded as to its veracity. I recently looked up the definition of ‘flapper’ when I was doing this morning’s post and here it is:
“Flappers of the 1920s were young women known for their energetic freedom, embracing a lifestyle viewed by many at the time as outrageous, immoral, or downright dangerous. Now considered the first generation of independent American women, ‘flappers’ pushed barriers in economic, political and sexual freedom for women”.

Given that definition of the term, my original belief is strengthened considerably. I suppose if ‘flappers’ of the 1920s were prone to engage in outrageous, immoral, and downright dangerous practices, then fanning their undercarriages at their backdoors in the hot heat of twilight seems like pretty small beer to me.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 13th March 2021

13/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to four Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish a happy birthday to Philip Ellis who lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Philip lost his father last year and has been unable to see his mother in her nursing home since the Covid pandemic began in March 2020. Hopefully, Philip can see mum soon. We also wish birthday greetings to Billy Brophy who lives in County Carlow, Ireland. Finally, we wish a happy birthday to Frankie Nolan and Dermot Flynn who both live in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. Have a nice day and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Coward of the County'. This song was written by Roger Bowling and Billy Ed Wheeler. It was recorded by American country music singer Kenny Rogers. The song was released in November 1979 as the second single from Rogers' multi-platinum album ‘Kenny’. It became a major crossover hit, topping the ‘Billboard Country’ chart, and reaching Number 3 on the ‘Hot 100 Chart’. It also topped the ‘Cash Box’ singles chart and was a Top 10 hit in numerous other countries worldwide topping the chart in Canada, the UK, and in Ireland, where it stayed at Number 1 for six consecutive weeks.

The narrator sings about his ward and nephew Tommy, a young man with a prominent reputation for never standing up for himself; his pacifism earned him the derisive nickname ‘Yellow’ from others throughout the county, but the narrator hints that he always felt there was something about Tommy that others did not see.

Tommy's non-violent attitude was greatly influenced by his father who died in prison when Tommy was ten years old; during his last visit his father, from his deathbed, pleads with Tommy to not make the same mistakes he made, telling him that ‘turning the other cheek’ is not a sign of weakness, and advising him, "Son, you don't have to fight to be a man".

Years later, Tommy is in a relationship with a woman named Becky who loves and accepts him as he is. One day while Tommy was at work, the three Gatlin Brothers assault Becky and gang-rape her. When he returns home and finds Becky crying and worse for wear, he is faced with the dilemma of having to choose between defending Becky's honour or upholding his father's plea to "walk away from trouble when he can".

Realizing he cannot ignore his predicament, Tommy goes to the barroom where the Gatlin gang out, but they only laugh at him when he walks in. After one of them meets him halfway across the floor Tommy turns around, and they assume he is going to walk away yet again until he stops and locks the front door. Fuelled by his long-bottled-up aggression, Tommy cuts loose and furiously fights all three Gatlin boys, leaving none of them standing by the time he left. The lyrics are ambiguous as to whether the Gatlin boys were dead or just unconscious, or if it was a gunfight or a fistfight.

Tommy then reflects on his late father's plea, addressing him respectfully that while he did his best to avoid trouble, he hopes his father understands that sometimes you have got to fight when you're a man.

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To be branded a coward was one of the greatest burdens to bear when I was growing up during the 1950s and 60s. The ‘Second World War’ was still not far enough away to have forgotten the many soldiers and civilians who had given up their lives in defence of Great Britain. As Hitler’s powerful Germany seized control of more countries, only Great Britain stood up to the tyrant and alone declared war after the invasion of Poland.

All the child heroes in the comics and at the cinemas then were characters of great stature like Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, The Lone Ranger, Biggles, etc. These were heroes who were not afraid to face the greatest dangers and mightiest odds. They were our fictional heroes while our fathers, grandfathers and uncles and aunts, and next-door neighbours, who had fought and battled through the ‘Second World War’ were our real-life heroes. Every boy and girl in England aspired to be a hero and the most despised character of all was a ‘coward’!

’As a teenager, one’s peers respected you more when you fought and lost instead of winning unfairly. Teenagers today would laugh at what we considered unfair in the mid-1950s. Using any implement as a weapon would instantly brand any brawler a coward, as would kicking an opponent. You fought with your fists, you fought one-on-one, and when an opponent said ‘enough’ or ‘paid’, you immediately stopped fighting them. If you did not, the crowd would pull you off and call you a coward into the bargain. There was a code for everything we did, even street fighting. And the treason for that was because we were reared to revere honour and bravery as British traits.

While bullying has always taken place ever since envy, anger, power, and peer prestige became the driving force of bullies. Bullies would not be tolerated by a group of peers in my youth, as it militated against the code of honour most Englanders abided by. Bullying cannot exist without the observers remaining complicit by their silence and inactivity as Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying, “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men”. As a rule of thumb, there were fewer bullies in the late 1940s and early 1950s than there have been ever since.

I suppose that in many ways, courage is the fear of being thought a coward. I know that during my youth, my greatest fear was fear itself. If ever there was something or someone of whom I was frightened, I would make a point of deliberately confronting my fear. This was a foolhardy thing to do when I think about the risks I unwisely took.

I will never forget the factory chimney at the mill where I worked. The chimney had ladders up each side from top to bottom. A work colleague bet me £5 that I dare not climb it. I had always hated heights, and I naturally declined his wager, but that did not prevent my fear start to fester inside me. Eventually, when I could no longer deny the fear that was generated in my mind by the sheer thought of climbing that mill chimney. A phrase from the 1933 inaugural address of President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the USA came to mind when he announced, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself?”

My fear of climbing the mill chimney disturbed me to the extent that one summer evening after I had worked overtime, before going home at the end of my day, I looked up at the chimney and became angry at the fear that the thought of climbing it had created in me. It was as if my fear was controlling mem and making me less of an independent person. Being a ‘control freak’ and a person who believed himself in charge of his own fate essentially compelled me to climb the chimney, even if I slipped, fell and died in my attempt.

Without telling anyone, I climbed up on the inside of the ladder as I assumed that would be safer. I was wrong. Climbing on the inside of the ladder forced me to look outwards and downwards, which merely increased my fear of heights, besides being harder to climb up than ascending on the outside of the ladder. During the climb, my hands froze with fear a few times as I cursed myself for my foolish pride as I hung onto the rungs for life. The climb was completed in a fear that bordered on terror and rage, both all the way up and back down. I have never been so relieved to feel my feet back on the ground and I lie not when I say, I would not climb the same chimney again for £1 million! That was the last time in my life that I ever behaved in such a dangerous and foolhardy manner.

Was I asked today, “What is the most cowardly thing anyone could do?”, my answer would have nothing to do with courage, fighting, or sheer bravado. It would have nothing to do with physically assaulting another individual, but by insulting the feelings and disturbing the emotions of another person. I would refer to the attack upon the heart of another. Imagine the emotional hurt involved in desiring a close and loving relationship with another who gives you all the signs of wanting the same as you do as they declare their love for you. Then, once they have awakened the love in you, they do not follow through with action that corresponded with their initial declaration of love. Instead of loving you, they leave you high and dry. That to me would represent the most cowardly of all acts.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 12th March 2021

12/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to my brother-in-law, Richard Lumb who is my sister Mary’s partner. Richard lives in Heckmondwike and is 84 years old today. Have a smashing day, Richard. Love you lots. Bill and Sheila xx

We also wish a happy birthday to my Facebook friend, Allan Mortimer who comes from Bradford, and Sinead Casey who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. Enjoy your special day, Alan, and Sinead, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Feels Like I’m In Love.’ This song was recorded by the Scottish singer, Kelly Marie. It reached Number 1 on the ‘UK Single’s Chart’ in September 1980. The song was written by Ray Dorset and Mungo Jerry. The song was originally intended for Elvis Presley who recorded it in 1977 but he died before it was released. When it was originally released on Pye Records in 1979, the song was a sleeper hit on the Scottish club scene before breaking through nationally in the summer of 1980, before reaching the top of the ‘UK Singles Chart’. The following year, aided by several remixes, the song became a club hit in the US, reaching Number 10 on the US ‘Hot Dance Club Play Chart’.

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I suppose that one of the most confusing emotions one can experience is ‘falling in love’. The reason is somewhat complex. While there are many common features that we all experience when we are in love, we all differ in other respects. What distinguishes such differences depend largely on what our initial love attraction is primarily based, or is seeking to achieve/aspire to. Should we be physically drawn to someone with an intensity of passion that we have not previously met in ourselves, then we might find it impossible to keep their hands off our lover and display the need to constantly touch them. Another person who had a very uncertain, insecure, and abusive past life where they were let down repeatedly, might naturally seek feelings of safety and constant reassurance in their love expectations. Someone who has experienced a lifetime of debt and material hardship might need financial security in their relationship to meet their love expectations, whereas some may see their love expectations and ideal future together wrapped up in the parenting of children. And we have all heard of the people who express their expectation of a new partner when they demand, ‘love me, love my dog!’ (or worse still nine cats!)

The above differences in ‘love expectation’ are what makes finding a 'perfect' love match between two people almost impossible to achieve. Most of us will be satisfied with an approximation of our wants and needs being fulfilled. Just as any antique collector will tell you, ‘perfection’ in any item of precious worth is virtually impossible to find. Whether it is the most delicate and the finest porcelain or the rarest of coins in mint condition. Even too much handling of perfect goods removes them from their state of ‘perfection’; and so it is with people! None of us come to any new relationship of the heart without the trappings of some past trauma or the carriage of some emotional baggage that still remains fully unwrapped and not emotionally resolved. Such experiences are often secretly placed in the bottom drawer of our future life.

Being deeply loved by someone gives us all added strength while loving someone entirely gives us a depth of courage which can border on sheer bravado and recklessness in the extreme. We are most alive when we are in love. We are at our most unpredictable and even at our most dangerous when we are in love. There is simply no danger we fear facing to protect our newfound love, no fear too perilous to confront. Together we are prepared to face all obstacles placed before us which threaten our continued happiness. If we were to take on the whole world, we believe our love will be strong enough to beat it hands down! However great the impediment that stands in the way of our love, we will sweep it aside. However high the mountain that needs ascending, it will be climbed. There is no earthly cave, chasm, sea, or ocean which is deep enough to bury and drowned the love we hold for each other. When we look at the night-time sky we see our love shining in the brightest star, we watch it burn through the mid-day sun, and see its reflection spooning on the moon's surface. Our love is most visible of all, however, when we look into each other’s eyes, and when we hold hands, embrace, kiss, and make love; and sincerely say “I love you”.

There is no thing or person that will be allowed to trespass on the happiness of two people who are deeply in love. There is no vested interest too great to be defeated, be it considerations of family objections, financial power, social status, religious affiliation, or indeed anything of significance beneath the clouds! Love gives lovers one purpose primarily. It offers them prospects of future happiness together beyond all reasonable doubt. To love and be loved in equal measure is everything and more besides. Love is a blissful entity where the two people in love represent complementary pieces of a whole that make the perfect match when put together.

There is romantic gardening that occurs in all loving relationships which takes place during the first spring of a lasting romance. A couple’s love cultivates the blossoming of each other’s finest traits and fullest bloom, and any thought of domination is banished behind the weeds in the compost heap. We trust our love completely, and we are ideally placed and are at maximum comfort in each other’s shade and sun of both morning and afternoon. Years of a loving and nurturing relationship will witness splendid flowering of our partnership as we hold hands and heart in our marriage plot of land; our Garden of Eden.

Think about this a moment. Hold your lover's hand and let go, and you can still reach back out and hold their hand again, but hold the heart of your lover, and carelessly let go, and their heart is lost forever as it falls to the ground and is broken, wounded, and bleeds. Even the truest and most faithful of loving partnerships need emotional and spiritual nourishment to thrive and be maintained throughout all seasons if it is to survive. Love left unattended, will if neglected long enough, eventually fade and die. 'Falling in love' is effortless.‘Being in love' is easy; it happens, and our only response required is how we handle it. ‘Staying in love’ however, is a different kettle of fish! We have to actively work to maintain it at the standard we came to initially know it. That requires the nourishment of each partner’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.

That is essentially what the enlightened French writer, historian, and philosopher, François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume ‘Voltaire’, once remarked when he was talking about tending to our own garden:

“We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.”
I have felt all this and much more about my relationship with my wife, Sheila, ever since we first fell in love with each other. I swear I could not love her as much as I do today, and yet I know that when I wake up tomorrow, I will love her more. The best thing we have been able to hold onto, particularly since I have developed two terminal cancers after our marriage in November 2012, is each other. If we can hold on to each other, we can continue to hold on to the happiness that binds us closer than any two people I know.

It has been a long time now, Sheila, since I wrote you a love letter, but were I to write you one today, I would have to say the following:
“I will love you, Sheila Forde, until the stars fade into a black hole in the sky, the sun stops shining, and the moon fails to wake for its night shift, and the tides do not return to their shores. All that has ever mattered between us, Sheila, has been the moment we share. Was I asked, 'What do you love Sheila for, Bill?' while there is a long list of your positive traits I could readily identify, I could reduce it to one word only, “Forever”.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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MEDICAL UPDATE: WILLIAM FORDE: MARCH 11th 2021.

11/3/2021

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We attended St. James' Hospital, Leeds today, to see my oncologist cancer consultant. The recent CT Scan revealed that cancer has advanced in my face since she last saw me. She offered me the cancer drug CEMIPLIMAB and explained over half an hour all of the implications and possible side effects. I will be the fifth person in Leeds to have been offered this relatively new drug since it became available for use two years ago. So, we are still relatively at the 'trial stage' regarding efficacy (possible 40 percent efficacy) and its possible adverse side-effects.

The list of side effects is extensive and far more than the side effects of chemotherapy. The definite side effects include depletion of energy, weight loss, loss of appetite, and risk of damage to kidneys and other major organs due to inflammation of these organs including lungs, plus too many more side effects to enumerate. While the drug cannot cure, the scary thing is that it could potentially kill. If successful, it will slow down my aggressive skin cancer in my forehead, neck, face, shoulder, and throat area.

The treatment will involve one day as an outpatient every three weeks at St. James' Hospital for a few hours infusion of the drug intravenously, plus examinations and consultations in between to check that my other organs are not being damaged in the process. In the event that my body cannot tolerate the treatment or acts too badly to it, the treatment will be instantly abandoned. Unfortunately, they will not know if it is having a positive effect on my cancer until after the fifth infusion (almost four months down the line and between my fourth and fifth infusion).

I am pleased to be offered the drug as the fifth patient in the Leeds Hospital area. In many ways, it is somewhat a Hobson choice. It is the only option left open to me. If I take the drug and it works, although it will slow down cancer and extend my life a bit longer, it will prevent me from tasting and enjoying this year's spring and summer crop of new spuds from our allotment. If I do not take the drug, I could possibly die before this year's crop of new spuds in our allotment.

Because I love life more than new spuds, I will willingly swap the opportunity of having even days, weeks, or months longer with my wife and loved ones. It does sadden me, however, that I only have a few weeks left of remaining able to sing, as singing was a major part of my early life, and became a significant part of my happiness factors over the last three years.

So, I shall become one of the Leeds 'Famous Five' this Easter and meanwhile, I shall enjoy every single day left when I can still string a few notes together. Whatever decision I made today, of one thing I was certain, 'A change is gonna come'.

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 11th March 2021

11/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to a mother and daughter who are part of the Forde family. We wish a happy birthday to Linda Forde and Sam Swales who share the same birthday. Linda is married to my brother Peter, a retired Educational Psychologist. Sam is Peter and Linda’s daughter, and she is also my favourite niece, which is hopefully a detail that I trust she will never reveal to all my other nieces in the Forde family.

Sam has had a very emotional sixteen months. In late 2019, she and her partner (and Sam’s two children) went to live in Scotland to start a new life. They were so happy and had lots of plans to look forward to. Then, in early 2020, Sam’s partner (who was not yet fifty years old), died with Covid-19. Wanting to be closer to her family support structure again, Sam and the children have recently moved back down to Dewsbury in West Yorkshire to be near to mum and dad and the rest of the Forde clan. Let us hope that 2021 proves to be a happier year for Linda, Sam, and their families. Love Billy and Sheila xx

My song today is ‘All I Ask of You’. This song is from the 1986 English musical ‘The Phantom of the Opera'. It was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Richard Stilgoe, and was produced by Lloyd Webber. The song was released as a single in September 1986, by Sarah Brightman and Cliff Richard. The song achieved commercial success in several territories, including in Ireland and South Africa, where it topped the charts, and the United Kingdom, where it peaked at Number 3. The song has been covered by numerous artists such as The Shadows: Elaine Page: Jackie Evancho: Susan Boyle: Donny Osmond: Josh Groban: Barbara Streisand: Kelly Clarkson etc.

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The title of this song reminds me of several men and women who I worked with as a Probation Officer between 1970-95 in West Yorkshire, plus a few I have known since; all of whom craved a person with whom to share their life. One of the most heartfelt pleas I have heard from such people was, “All I want is that I have someone to love, and who will love me in return.”

I still remember one woman in her early forties once tell me, “All I ask, Mr. Forde, is that they are loving, loyal, faithful, truthful, sincere, generous, humorous, dependable, someone who doesn’t flare off the handle at nothing, a family person……oh, and a dog lover!” The woman was university educated, well-groomed, and attractive for her age. She had been an only child and her parents were no longer on the scene. Her mother had left her father when the daughter was in her teens and had gone to live in South Africa, and her father had died in his early sixties. The woman concluded by saying, “I do not really think I am asking for much; just a good man with those qualities I mentioned will do”.

I was separated from my wife at the time, and I was going through a divorce which I did not want. I did not want to tell the woman that I considered her long shopping list of qualities she wanted to be somewhat unrealistic, especially if she expected all of those qualities to be found in one man. I instantly got a mental image of her ideal man, and I recall telling her that if she was lucky enough to find such a man on the planet, despite being wholly heterosexual, I’d marry him myself if she didn’t want him!

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 10th March 2021

10/3/2021

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I dedicate my song today to five Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish happy birthday to David Hanlon Kelly and Martha Fitzgerald who live in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Caroline Ingram who comes from Belfast, Ireland: George Minett who I grew up with on Windybank Estate, but who now lives in Crewe, Cheshire: Mark Purvis who attends the same church as myself and Sheila and who lives in Oxenhope, West Yorkshire. Enjoy your special day and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Walk Hand in Hand with Me’. This was a popular song by Johnny Cowell in 1956. The biggest-selling version recorded of the song was sung by Tony Martin that reached Number 2 in the United Kingdom and Number 10 on the ’Billboard Hot 100’ chart in 1956. The same year, it was recorded by Andy Williams, whose version hit Number 54 on the chart, and by Ronnie Carroll, whose version reached Number 13 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’. A later recording by ‘Gerry and the Pacemakers’ reached Number 29 on the UK chart, Number 10 in Canada, and ‘bubbled under’ at Number 103 on the Billboard chart at the end of 1965.

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As many of you know, I was run over by a large vehicle at the age of 11years. I was almost killed and was left with multiple life-threatening injuries that included a damaged spine, a collapsed lung, a crushed chest with all but two ribs broken, and both legs and arms were broken in several places each. Having my twisted body wrapped around the main drive propellor shaft of the vehicle beneath the under-carriage when it knocked me down and ran over me, essentially left me in a mangled state. Most bones in my body were broken and I was unable to walk for three years because of my damaged spine which left me with no feelings beneath my waistline for the first six months of hospitalisation.

When my spine was working again, because one of my legs had been broken in many places on and near the knee, I needed almost dozens of operations on my left leg, with each operation breaking and resetting the leg to make it straight.

During my 9 month-period in Batley Hospital, my spine started transmitting signals to my brain and my legs again, where immediately following my accident, all feeling beneath my waist had been lost. This led the doctors to tell me and my parents that I would never walk again. I left the hospital and returned home unable to stand or walk. I missed the next 18 months of schooling as I need more operations on my legs. I had dozens of operations to straighten my left leg, and I started to engage in exercises that would improve my balance, as one of my legs had been left three inches shorter in length than its mate and I was determined not to wear a built-up boot with steel leg supports down each side. Two years after my hospital discharge, I could barely stand with the different lengths of each leg, and I was still unable to walk. It would be a further year before I started to hobble around.

Over the next year, I even cycled daily before I could stand properly or walk, and whenever I fell off my bike (usually at road junctures where I needed to stop), I would fall to the ground, where I would lay until some stranger came along and either placed me back in the saddle of my bike or took me back home.

When this song first came out, I was almost 14 years. It would be a further six months before I was able to hobble about unaided, but until then, my sisters Mary and Eileen would either push me in a home-made bunker to a friend’s house on the estate or sometimes I would place an arm around each of their shoulders and they would act as my human crutches as they ‘walked hand in hand with me’. As with all brother and sister relationships, we might occasionally fall out or have cross words with each other, especially as I was the oldest in the family, and I still naturally expected to get my own way. Whenever this happened, my sisters, Mary and Eileen would plonk me down to sit on a low-level wall and then run off home laughing their heads off. I might still be sitting on that wall if my mother had not made them return for me.

That was the moment when it dawned on me, however much they loved me, and me them, I had better get myself walking sooner rather than later, and not have to depend on them again! Since early 2013, I contracted terminal blood cancer. There then followed another two cancers; an aggressive skin cancer that spread from my forehead to my neck, face, shoulder, and throat. I have also developed rectal wart cancer, and I had lymphoma. In addition, I have had a dozen operations, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and numerous hospital procedures.

When I was still able to walk a little distance, six or seven years ago, I occasionally walked one mile around a park in Wakefield with my sisters, Mary and Eileen. I was happy for Mary and Eileen to accompany me during my walks despite my growing immobility, but only because I now carry a mobile phone in my pocket and can call my wife, Sheila, and ask her to come and fetch me should they get it into their heads to run off and leave me again!

Love and peace
Bill xxx

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