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      • No Need to Look for Love
      • 'The Love Quartet' >
        • The Tannery Wager
        • 'Fini and Archie'
        • 'The Love Bridge'
        • 'Forgotten Love'
      • The Priest's Calling Card >
        • Chapter One - The Irish Custom
        • Chapter Two - Patrick Duffy's Family Background
        • Chapter Three - Patrick Duffy Junior's Vocation to Priesthood
        • Chapter Four - The first years of the priesthood
        • Chapter Five - Father Patrick Duffy in Seattle
        • Chapter Six - Father Patrick Duffy, Portlaw Priest
        • Chapter Seven - Patrick Duffy Priest Power
        • Chapter Eight - Patrick Duffy Groundless Gossip
        • Chapter Nine - Monsignor Duffy of Portlaw
        • Chapter Ten - The Portlaw Inheritance of Patrick Duffy
      • Bigger and Better >
        • Chapter One - The Portlaw Runt
        • Chapter Two - Tony Arrives in California
        • Chapter Three - Tony's Life in San Francisco
        • Chapter Four - Tony and Mary
        • Chapter Five - The Portlaw Secret
      • The Oldest Woman in the World >
        • Chapter One - The Early Life of Sean Thornton
        • Chapter Two - Reporter to Investigator
        • Chapter Three - Search for the Oldest Person Alive
        • Chapter Four - Sean Thornton marries Sheila
        • Chapter Five - Discoveries of Widow Friggs' Past
        • Chapter Six - Facts and Truth are Not Always the Same
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        • Chapter 1 - 'Return of the Prodigal Son'
        • Chapter 2 - 'The early years of sweet innocence in Portlaw'
        • Chapter 3 - 'The Separation'
        • Chapter 4 - 'Separation and Betrayal'
        • Chapter 5 - 'Portlaw to Manchester'
        • Chapter 6 - 'Salford Choices'
        • Chapter 7 - 'Life inside Prison'
        • Chapter 8 - 'The Aylesbury Pilgrimage'
        • Chapter 9 - Sean's interest in stone masonary'
        • Chapter 10 - 'Sean's and Tony's Partnership'
        • Chapter 11 - 'Return of the Prodigal Son'
      • The Alternative Christmas Party >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
      • The Life of Liam Lafferty >
        • Chapter One: ' Liam Lafferty is born'
        • Chapter Two : 'The Baptism of Liam Lafferty'
        • Chapter Three: 'The early years of Liam Lafferty'
        • Chapter Four : Early Manhood
        • Chapter Five : Ned's Secret Past
        • Chapter Six : Courtship and Marriage
        • Chapter Seven : Liam and Trish marry
        • Chapter Eight : Farley meets Ned
        • Chapter Nine : 'Ned comes clean to Farley'
        • Chapter Ten : Tragedy hits the family
        • Chapter Eleven : The future is brighter
      • The life and times of Joe Walsh >
        • Chapter One : 'The marriage of Margaret Mawd and Thomas Walsh’
        • Chapter Two 'The birth of Joe Walsh'
        • Chapter Three 'Marriage breakup and betrayal'
        • Chapter Four: ' The Walsh family breakup'
        • Chapter Five : ' Liverpool Lodgings'
        • Chapter Six: ' Settled times are established and tested'
        • Chapter Seven : 'Haworth is heaven is a place on earth'
        • Chapter Eight: 'Coming out'
        • Chapter Nine: Portlaw revenge
        • Chapter Ten: ' The murder trial of Paddy Groggy'
        • Chapter Eleven: 'New beginnings'
      • The Woman Who Hated Christmas >
        • Chapter One: 'The Christmas Enigma'
        • Chapter Two: ' The Breakup of Beth's Family''
        • Chapter Three: From Teenager to Adulthood.'
        • Chapter Four: 'The Mills of West Yorkshire.'
        • Chapter Five: 'Harrison Garner Showdown.'
        • Chapter Six : 'The Christmas Dance'
        • Chapter Seven : 'The ballot for Shop Steward.'
        • Chapter Eight: ' Leaving the Mill'
        • Chapter Ten: ' Beth buries her Ghosts'
        • Chapter Eleven: Beth and Dermot start off married life in Galway.
        • Chapter Twelve: The Twin Tragedy of Christmas, 1992.'
        • Chapter Thirteen: 'The Christmas star returns'
        • Chapter Fourteen: ' Beth's future in Portlaw'
      • The Last Dance >
        • Chapter One - ‘Nancy Swales becomes the Widow Swales’
        • Chapter Two ‘The secret night life of Widow Swales’
        • Chapter Three ‘Meeting Richard again’
        • Chapter Four ‘Clancy’s Ballroom: March 1961’
        • Chapter Five ‘The All Ireland Dancing Rounds’
        • Chapter Six ‘James Mountford’
        • Chapter Seven ‘The All Ireland Ballroom Latin American Dance Final.’
        • Chapter Eight ‘The Final Arrives’
        • Chapter Nine: 'Beth in Manchester.'
      • 'Two Sisters' >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
        • Chapter Fifteen
        • Chapter Sixteen
        • Chapter Seventeen
      • Fourteen Days >
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
      • ‘The Postman Always Knocks Twice’ >
        • Author's Foreword
        • Contents
        • Chapter One
        • Chapter Two
        • Chapter Three
        • Chapter Four
        • Chapter Five
        • Chapter Six
        • Chapter Seven
        • Chapter Eight
        • Chapter Nine
        • Chapter Ten
        • Chapter Eleven
        • Chapter Twelve
        • Chapter Thirteen
        • Chapter Fourteen
        • Chapter Fifteen
        • Chapter Sixteen
        • Chapter Seventeen
        • Chapter Eighteen
        • Chapter Nineteen
        • Chapter Twenty
        • Chapter Twenty-One
        • Chapter Twenty-Two
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Song For Today: 31st May 2020

31/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Joan Ryan Walsh who lives in Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary, Ireland, and Pauline Cronin. Pauline used to live in Carrick-on-Suir but now resides in Manchester. Both ladies celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your day, Joan, and Pauline, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘One Day at a Time’. This popular Country and Western-style Christian song were written by Mari-john Wilkin and Kris Kristofferson. It has been recorded by over 200 artists and has reached No.1 in several territories.

The song was first recorded by American Country singer Marilyn Sellers in 1974. This version became a US top 40 hit and top 20 hit on the Country Charts. Following this, it won the 1975 ‘Gospel Music’. Between 1979 and 1980, the song spent ninety weeks in the ‘Irish Top 30 Chart’,. Which set a record of the longest run in Irish chart history. The Association (GMA) Dove Awards made it ‘Best Song’.

‘One Day at a Time’ became best known among country fans when recorded by American country gospel singer Cristy Lane. Lane had started enjoying mainstream success in the late 1970s through the release of several secular hits, including ‘Let Me Down Easy’ and ’Simple Little Words.’ In 1979, Lane recorded the song after it became a Number 1 hit in the United Kingdom by Lena Martell. Initially, the recording company was reluctant to release the record but after it’s release in the late winter of 1980, and by the end of the spring, the song was Number 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles’ chart.

"One Day at a Time" was Lane's only Number 1 hit. For Kristofferson, the song was his sixth Number 1 hit as a songwriter.

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I spent the last 27 years of my working life employed as a Probation Officer in West Yorkshire. During this time, I specialised in many roles that essentially involved helping the client to resolve a problem behaviour that made them either unhappy, unhealthy, unhopeful, or led to them committing offences.

Many problems were of the addictive variety, drinking, drugs, sexual deviousness, money mismanagement, compulsive behaviour, etc. etc.

Since 1970, when I first came across the subject and method of working known as ‘Behaviourism’, I knew that I had found a way of working with people and helping them resolve their mental, physical, psychological and emotional problems through a method that philosophically appealed to me and my belief set.
When I entered the Probation Service in 1970, the main method of working with clients was to spend hundreds of hours with them, simply letting them talk while the worker ‘ummed and ahhed’ while nodding their head intermittently in a typical ‘Rogerian’ manner. After the office interview, the interview would then be meticulously processed, analysed, and recorded by the worker. The sole work method practised then was ‘Rogerianism’; a method of counselling which depended heavily upon listening, empathising and analysing.

Carl Ransom Rogers was an American psychologist and he was among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology. Born in Illinois, United States I 1902, during his lifetime (he died in 1987), Rogers was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud. He essentially believed (as most past and present psychologists believe) that if the reason behind a person’s problem disposition can be discovered, this ‘insight’ will eventually lead to them working through their problem behaviour and resolving their problematic situation.

The reason why ‘Behaviourism’ was my chosen method of work in 1970 and thereafter, was that instead of concerning oneself initially ‘why’ this person has this problem or had that problem, I found it more effectively expedient to both worker and client to concern oneself with ‘how’ can I change the problem behaviour? instead of ‘why did it occur initially?’ It did not matter to me if the client had been potty trained or not or whether they had been sexually fixated on their father or mother (an importance that Freud ascribed to their current problematic state). What mattered most to the client was, ‘How can I stop doing this?’ or ‘How can I stop being like this?’

This aim was what became my prime objective. I saw my prime function as stopping and changing the client’s problematic response and overall situation, irrespective as to what initially caused the problem.

As for the concept of ‘insight’, I eventually concluded that ‘insight’ is invariably a retrospective benefit which is more likely to occur after the emotional problem has been resolved and the problematic behaviour and situation have changed for the better. Nobody can solve any problem which they are too emotionally close to, as too many partners and family members have found when they have unsuccessfully tried to help. They find that they are often unable to help because they are too emotionally close to the problem and the relative displaying the problem, and their emotional closeness loses their objectivity and adversely affects their action. I always found as a worker with problematic clients that it was far better to deal with the ‘how’ first. After the problem has been resolved and the problematic behaviour and situation changed, by all means, look into the question ‘why did this happen?’ One is more likely to locate the original cause of the problem, only when the individual is emotionally distanced from their original problem. That is the essential philosophy of ‘Behaviourism’.

Without going into all the various and numerous methods of behaviourism, let me deal with one important principle that applies to most behaviourist methods used. When needing to make big changes in one’s life or behaviour, it is more effective to tackle it gradually, bit by bit instead of trying to do it in one fell swoop. Just as an alcoholic or an addict is advised to approach life ‘one day at a time’, so most behaviour that is to be positively changed long-term is better achieved by gradual incremental steps( but please note, not always so; especially for type ‘A’ personality types).

People who learn to take one day at a time are more likely to deal better with problems in a more manageable way. Anyone who is a good manager or fixer of problem situations has already learned how to get from one moment to the next, instead of breaking their back trying to deal with a day that has not yet arrived and may never do so!

As a person who has worked with stressful people all my life, I can tell you that the greatest problem is doing too much at one go. The biggest problem is trying to cram too many things into one day, which usually leads to not doing any of them adequately, and taking on too many tasks that cannot possibly be completed in the time you are allocated (whether by others or yourself). All the energy a person employs on attempting to complete the unachievable will merely be ‘wasted energy’, This downward spiral of unproductivity will not only diminish your energy level but will simultaneously increase your stress and anxiety, besides reducing the number of tasks one would have otherwise competently achieved.

Each desert begins with one grain of sand at its centre. Every constellation in the heavens starts with one shining star. Every week has in its beginning its first day, in its centre one middle day, and at its end one concluding day. It is of no use trying to see the end of anything that is not within your sight or grasp when you are at the start of it! The only thing it can get you is disappointment, frustration, and increased worry, anxiety, stress, and fear.

‘One step at a time’ is a good way to approach an unknown situation, and ‘One day at a time’ is a good way to approach and live one’s life. When everything in life’s equation has been included, each of our lives are made up of millions of moments. The very essence of ‘being’ is something of the moment; something of ‘here and now’.
​
Love and peace Bill x
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Song For Today: 30th May 2020

30/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today Bernie Walsh who lives in the city in which I was born, County Waterford, Ireland. Bernie celebrates her birthday today. Enjoy your special day, Bernie, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is, ‘Please Help Me I’m Falling’. This song was written by Don Robertson and Hal Blair and first recorded by Hank Locklin in 1960. The single was Locklin's most successful recording and was his second Number 1 hit on the country charts. ‘Please Help Me, I'm Falling’ spent fourteen weeks at the top spot and spent nine months on the country chart and crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100’ chart and peaked at Number 8.

The song has been covered by many artists that include: The Everly Brothers (1963): Charley Pride (1967): John Fogerty (1973): Dolly Parton. Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette (1993): Gladys Knight (2001): David Ball (2007).

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Was I ever to write and have published an autobiography of my life and experiences, ‘My Romantic Period’ in the book would cover the years between 9 and 73. There will naturally have been ‘a start’ to my romantic period, ‘an end’ and most certainly ‘a peak’. During my entire ‘romantic period’ of life, I would either have been ‘in love’ with a beautiful woman or in the process of ‘falling in love’ with one.

I started ‘my romantic period’ of life as a nine-year-old boy who stole a diamond engagement ring from a friend’s house to give to his ten-year-old girlfriend at ‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ in Heckmondwike. I will not say that this was my first theft, but it was the first offence of stealing for which I was caught and spoken to by the local policeman. While my girlfriend (Winifred Healey) for whom I stole the engagement ring, proudly showed it off to all her school friend’s, as she initially told them that she would ‘go with me’ (1950’S slang for ‘marry me’ when she was old enough to), once the police had nabbed me for the theft, Winifred speedily repented her part in the acceptance of stolen goods and turned Queen’s Evidence. She must have received a hefty penance in the confessional box when she confessed her sin to the parish priest, as she entered a convent and trained to become a nun as soon as she left school at the age of 15 years.

The final years of my ‘romantic period’ was after my two nine-month courses of chemotherapy for terminal blood cancer I developed after my marriage to Sheila in November 2012. During my 18 months of chemotherapy, certain drugs were used which leave the patient’s hands and feet forever tingling thereafter. This is an unfortunate side effect of chemotherapy that cannot be effectively treated. Ever since my chemotherapy courses, I have had these sensations in my hands and feet constantly. The urge to constantly move one’s hands and feet never leaves during the day or the night, and it has become common practice for me to shuffle my body and shake my feet constantly. The feelings get worse when I lay in bed. When I try to settle down and get off to sleep, my body constantly twists and turns in the bed, and sometimes when it is bad, the only response that alleviates my leg discomfort is to kick my feet into the air like a child having a temper tantrum. The effect on my sleeping partner, Sheila, was to receive constant bruises. As my legs involuntary kicked out, Sheila said that it was like sleeping at the side of a farmer’s threshing machine all night long; and a snoring one at that!

To enable my bed partner and wife, Sheila, to get any sleep at all, I started using a second bedroom at the other side of the house, which eventually became ‘my own bedroom’. Initially, like the royals and the aristocrats around the country, we would visit each other’s bedroom whenever we wanted to surprise and to show the other person something interesting.

Unfortunately, around the age of 73 years, my active love life came to an end when I needed another seven operations and 40 sessions of radiotherapy because of the development of two additional cancers (rectal warts and skin cancer to my head, face, and neck. I am still a hopeless romantic at the age of 77 years, and it is a good job that I have always been a dreamer.

However, needing to avoid all strenuous activity these days effectively means that I now have to channel my romantic actions in different ways that please my 63-year-old loving wife. I refer to those small things that couples often overlook, failure to take interest in the interests and expressed views of one’s partner: telling them you love them at the start, end and during every day: giving them a loving kiss: holding hands: complimenting them on some pleasing aspect of their character and behaviour: sharing a joke or laughing with them: touching their hair lovingly as you brush past their chair or simply placing a hand on their shoulder: cuddling: being intimate in any way that is mutually acceptable and desired at the time.

The height of ‘My Romantic Period’, however, was undoubtedly between the ages of 15-26 years before I first married. This was my peak of romantic interest and represented a time in my life that I was willing and fit enough to do something about any romantic advancement I ever made and was warmly welcomed. My greatest handicap as a romantic teenager was that I had not the slightest intention of getting married before my thirties as I intended to pursue my dream of living in Canada and travelling around Canada and parts of the United States between the ages of 21-23 years. Consequently, While I often was physically involved with a young woman, this romantic involvement never extended to ‘getting emotionally involved’.

This reluctance/resistance to become emotionally attached to any young woman I dated did not take into consideration my propensity to ‘fall in love’ with every beautiful young woman I ever met and went out with. I could not help the fact that I was a hopeless romantic who was always ‘falling in love’. I was obviously a young man who was as turned on by the chase more than the kill. It was the process of ‘falling in love’ with a beautiful young woman that stimulated me more than the actuality of ‘being in love’. In some ways. I was not too dissimilar from certain women who marry six or seven times because they love being a bride on their wedding day but do not want to be married thereafter.

This inconsistency in my character was enabled because I never ‘fell in love’ for more than a few weeks at a time before I found myself ‘falling back out of love’. I had obviously discovered early on in my teenage years that whilst I needed to constantly ‘be in love’, and that I loved the experience of ‘falling in love’ most of all, I never wanted ‘to be in love’. I recognised early on that if I did not want to become emotionally involved with any of the young women I dated, that I dare not remain either physically involved with or ‘in love’ with them any longer than a month maximum. So, I decided there and then that as I needed that feeling of always ‘falling in love’ with a beautiful young woman, it was okay for me ‘to fall in love’, but only on the proviso that in between each romantic experience, I also ensured that I ‘fell out of love’ with the young woman I was presently dating; thereby enabling me to ‘fall back in love again’ with the next beautiful young woman I would meet.

Isn’t love the most complicated thing? It is now. It was then and it always will be! It was also a near-impossible task for any young person during the early 1960s to defy the conventions of the day and to remain of single status after the age of twenty-one, whether male or female. For myself, I found the task extremely difficult.

You see, I had always loved the taste of wedding cake, but did not want to hear the sound of any church bells during my twenties beckoning the happy couple to the altar of matrimony; especially if I was the groom!
​
Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 29th May 2020

29/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friend, Mags Fenton who lives in Bradford. Mags celebrates her birthday today. Enjoy your day Mags and leave some room for lots of cake and suitable refreshments. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Pony Time’. This song was written by Don Covay and John Berry (a member of Covay's earlier vocal group, the ‘Rainbows’). It was originally recorded in 1960 by Covay with his group the ‘Goodtimers’.

The song achieved greater success when it was later recorded by Chubby Checker the following year, becoming his second US Number 1 (after his 1960 hit single ‘The Twist’). Chubby Checker's recording of ‘Pony Time’ was also a Number 1 hit on the ‘R&B Chart’. The song introduced a new dance style called, ‘The Pony’, in which the dancer tries to look like he or she is riding a horse.

The song begins with Checker's spoken announcement: “It's Pony Time, Get up". This is followed by the backup singers repeating the nonsensical phrase. "Boogety Boogety Boogety Boogety Shoe".

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I vaguely recall this song being released when I was aged 19 years in the era that Chubby Checker brought out his song and dance ‘The Twist’. During this period, I would go to the dance halls between Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Bradford, Dewsbury, Cleckheaton, and Batley with a gang of friends to rock and roll. A group of teenagers from the estate where I lived in Liversedge would go dancing three times weekly.

I must confess to thinking the words of this song somewhat ridiculous, especially the silly horse-like actions the dancers to the song would be expected to perform on the dance floor. It was clearly an undignified way to either react or impress any young woman one was trying to get off with, I always thought. It was okay if one wanted to look like an ass on the dancefloor, but not for me thank you.

There is one incident that this song reminds me of more than any other. I recall going out with a young woman from Birstall near Leeds during my 19th year of life. We had struck up a relationship at the ‘Cleckheaton Town Hall’ dance one Saturday night. At the time, I was interested in any activity which improved my body balance (having one leg a few inches shorter than the other since my 12th year of life, following a bad accident and over 50 leg operations). I had considered the activity of horse riding for some time previously as representing good exercise to improve my balance, and for once, I was interested in my own legs more than looking at the legs of my dancing partner.

My dance partner was not the usual type of young woman who would attract my attention. She had a more ‘intellectual’ look about her than the more attractive young woman I might normally seek. Her speech denoted that she came from a middle-class family and she had also been educated at Grammar School and had been offered a university place in the autumn. However, once I learned that she took part in horse/pony riding events (and had done so since the age of thirteen years), my ears pricked up and she had my total attention the rest of that night, plus the month that followed. My date told me she would be ‘jumping’ in a pony event the following Sunday morning in Leeds and invited me to come and watch. This I did.

I arrived at the event around 10:30 am and saw my female friend stood alongside her pony talking to a couple who turned out to be her mother and father. Seeing me, she beckoned me across to meet her parents who had attended the event to support their daughter.

Now, I must explain my dress sense at the time. Outside of my millwork, I would always be dressed smartly in a bespoke fashionable black suit of good quality material, white cotton shirt, smart tie, and a pair of expensive shoes.

My propensity to always be seen outside work in the finest of clothes and to wear the best of footwear was an obvious overreaction and compensation for me having had to do without as a youngster. I was the firstborn of seven children within a poor household. My father was a miner and my mother was a full-time washer, ironer, darner, cooker, and cleaner, as well as being a baby factory in constant production. My main lesson learned on the home front during my school years essentially involved ‘learning to do without’.

Ever since I had started work in the mill, I always prioritised the purchase of clothes above every other form of spending. I especially purchased the dearest of footwear (often Italian shoes), because of having worn second-hand or cheap and ill-fitting shoes as a child. What really influenced me wanting expensive high-quality footwear as a working adult, however, was my childhood experience of being unable to walk for almost three years between the ages of 12-14, coupled with the 50 plus operations I needed on my legs between 11-14 years.

I cannot emphasise the lengths I would engage in to protect and preserve my clothes and footwear. Unlike the teenagers of today, I would always fold up my trousers neatly at the end of the night before going to bed, even when I had been out drinking, and I would never be seen wearing unclean and unpolished shoes. However new my shoes were, if someone stood on them, I would go wild. Even in a fight with another young man on a Saturday night out, I would prefer to be hit in the face with a brick than have someone step on my shoes or scuff them in a brawl as we rolled around on the ground. Having my shoes scuffed would pain me as much as having someone stood on my face, and I would instantly respond aggressively and knock seven bells out of them. I would always polish my black soft-leather shoes so much before I wore them, that I would be able to see the reflection of my face looking back up at me whenever I looked down toward the ground.

Also, being a working-class young man who had never owned any decent attire before I had started work, unlike my girlfriend’s family, I did not know that different situations and occasions in the social life of the middle classes dictated the wearing of different clothes. Working-class men only possessed two types of clothes; working clothes and weekend clothes.

Weekend clothes were one’s best clothes and consisted of one good suit and one pair of best shoes, one white cotton shirt, one tie, and one pocket-handkerchief; and that was that! Always having had fewer clothes than the middle-classes to adorn themselves with, the working classes had no need for wardrobes.

As for possessing ‘dress sense’, the only dress sense I displayed was to always wear a clean white shirt for Sunday best’ and never to go out in dirty underwear in the event of having an accident and being obliged to go into hospital. I would never wear unpolished black shoes (brown was the exclusive shoe colour of headmasters and the middle-classes), and I never kicked cans or stones and scuffed the leather of my footwear after I'd left school and had started buying my own clothes with my own hard-earned wages.! And, if I happened to get in a fight with another chap when I was wearing my best suit, I'd always get the first blow in. I would try to never let him floor me or wrestle me to the ground and risk tearing or soiling my best clothes as I fought.

I was a working-class young man who only had two occasions to ever consider my ‘dress sense’; going out to work and going out to enjoy myself leisurely. When I went to work, I wore my working clothes and when I went out leisurely, I wore my best clothes. That was it; simple! Being unacquainted with the numerous different occasions that the middle classes had to cope with engaging in their social sphere, it had never entered my mind that there were middle-class fashion and expectations of ‘being appropriately dressed for the occasion’(whatever that occasion happened to be).

As I walked smartly, but a bit apprehensively across the muddy field towards the parents of my latest date in my best weekend attire, I heard this enormous ‘squelching sound’ from the ground upon which I strode. I had walked through the biggest pile of horse shit ever to be shat in any Yorkshire Shire by the evacuation of the bowels of some middle-class pony upon the grass between paddock and field jumps.

By the time I reached my date and her parents, I was so embarrassed that I did not know where to put myself. Fortunately, my young date couldn’t care a fig and just laughed it off, whereas her parents were slightly more conservative in their response, and responded to the offensive smell by the engagement of small talk, coupled with their pretended ignorance of the horse shit on the soles of my Italian shoes which I attempted to clean on the field grass unnoticed.

That was the day when ‘dressing for the occasion’ became a practice that I accepted thereafter. I was clearly a young man who was eager to go places in my life, and I was in the process of learning the social graces of how one went on this journey between the classes. I would in due course learn the type of clothes one wore was just as important as what kind of event one went to, and what specific occasion one celebrated, and how one looked when one arrived, and who one went with!

At the age of 26 years, I married a teacher, and by the age of thirty, I had changed my job from being a Mill Manager and textile worker to the more professional occupation of becoming a Probation Officer. By the age of 30 years, I had negotiated three years of Night School Classes to complete the education (GCE ‘O-Level’ and ‘A-levels’) I had abandoned at the age of 15 years. This was followed by an I-year Probation Officer training course at ‘Newcastle upon Tyne Polytech and University’, plus one-year probationary training on the job in Huddersfield.

My marital abode was a three-bedroomed modern house that had its mortgage fully paid off. We ate out regularly at expensive restaurants, frequently consuming meals and drinking wine that cost twice as much as my hard-working father had earned in one week as a miner. Our standard of living on two professional wages, with no children to support, was high enough never to worry about having sufficient money to spend, and we holidayed abroad annually and went out weekly with a group of middle-class upwardly-mobile newlyweds who lived in the same Crescent.

Without realising it at the time, by my mid-thirties, my lifestyle, attitudes and general values had changed so much that it would have made Keir Hardi (the socialist founder of the Labour Party in the early 1900s) turn over in his grave. Everything about my then present lifestyle would have been anathema to my socialist father, my siblings, my old friends and workmates whom I had happily grown up with.

I was the son of a pit-face worker from a poor Irish immigrant family that settled in West Yorkshire. I was the oldest brother to six siblings who were reared in hand-me-down and jumble-sale clothes from infancy to teenage years. I was the firstborn in a family whose food this week was never paid for until my father’s next week’s wages. I was the 11-year-old boy who, after passing his 11 plus examinations to attend the local Grammar School could not bring himself to sit next to perceived ‘toffs’ and ‘middle-class kids’ in the ‘classroom’, so refused to change schools. I was the youngest trade union shop steward in Great Britain at the age of 18 years, and who had been offered a university sponsorship by the textile trade union with the prospect of being 'fast-tracked' within the trade union organisation.

I had changed dramatically since my marriage in my mid-twenties, and until after my divorce at the age of 40 years, I would remain socially less comfortable with the working classes into which I'd been born and reared and still unreconciled with the middle-class social circles in which I now moved.

My politics had invariably changed from those of ‘Labour’ to those of voting ‘Liberal’, before becoming gradually more Conservative as my material assets increased and my future work prospects became rosier the older I became. As I moved more upmarket in the social circles I now mixed with, so my new learning of the social graces correspondingly improved.

Eventually, the time arrived when I knew that it would be a long time before I would ‘put my foot in it again’.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 28th May 2020

28/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to any blonde-haired woman with magnetic eyes and who is presently in lockdown, generally fed up with her own company, missing the presence of loved ones, and especially if they find themselves in pain and discomfort because of some illness or physically debilitating condition. I particularly have in mind, Deborah J Ives from Leeds, who I know is in this category of person. IT IS NOT DEBORAH’S BIRTHDAY TODAY, but I know that the ‘big 60’ is not far off. I know you have been in much discomfort lately, Deborah, and that you are missing the physical presence of your son, Richard, and granddaughter, Annabelle, in your life greatly. Hold on, lass, and let us hope that none of us must wait too long for what we most want; to see our family again.

My song today is ‘Pretty Little Angel Eyes’. This is a 1961 song by American singer, Curtis Lee. It was released on Dunes Records. Phil Spector served as producer, and also produced Lee's follow-up hit ‘Under the Moon of Love’.
The track is in the doo-wop style, with backing vocals by the Halos. The ‘Halos’ were a doo-wop group composed of Harold Johnson, Al Cleveland, Phil Johnson, and Arthur Crier (bass).

The song spent 11 weeks on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart, peaking at Number 7 while reaching Number 6 on the ‘Cash Box Top 100’. Outside the US, the song reached Number 5 on New Zealand's ‘Lover Hit Parade’, Number 15 on Canada's ‘Chum Hit Parade’, and Number 47 on the UK's ‘Record Retailer’s Chart’. The song was also ranked Number 77 on Billboard’s end of year ‘Hot 100 for 1961 Top Sides of the Year’. It was also ranked Number 56 on Cash Box’s ‘Top 100 Chart Hits of 1961’.
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This song was released when I was 18-coming-on-19-years of age. At this age, I saw the world as my oyster, just waiting for me to come along, prise it open and gain the beautiful pearl at its heart. I was a romantic young man who was forever falling in love with every beautiful young woman I dated. I was a young man of bold and daring nature. I was fearless, adventurous, opinionated, and highly confident in everything I undertook. I was positive in thought and outlook, popular in demeanour, and highly successful when it came to dating, dancing, singing, and fighting.

Once I had started work and became financially independent, I became a snazzy dresser, and fashion and appearance took top priority in my wardrobe of significance. I always wore the best of suits, white cotton shirts, silk tie, and black leather shoes of the highest quality, often Italian in make. Having always had to make do with cheap shoes and sometimes second-hand clothes as a young lad at school, once I started work, I swore never to be poorly dressed or shod again. I did not care in the slightest whether I had sufficient coin in my pockets to spend. My pockets could have been empty as long the linings of my clothes were intact and without holes! Good clothes on my back and quality shoes on my feet made me feel as rich as a king.

I had always wanted to travel, and although I was proving very successful in the textile firm of ‘Harrison Gardeners Dyeworks’ where I worked, I had more ambitious plans for when I reached the age of 21 years. I had incurred a serious accident at the age of 11 years that nearly killed me and left me unable to walk for three years. Consequently, the court awarded me a significant amount of financial compensation, which would be paid to me at the age of 21 years. Hence, this money would provide me with the financial means to travel and to live abroad for a few years before I decided to marry, parent children, and settle down to a life of domesticity back in England.

I had always been a well-read and clever young man with a good brain and a persuasive tongue. Just after my 18th birthday (and within the same month), I was to achieve a double accolade. Our Youth Leader of ‘St Barnabas Youth Club’ in Hightown fell ill and was scheduled to be off work for three months. He was called Harry Field and he recommended to his employers that I could hold the fort until he returned. For the next three months, I became the youngest paid part-time Youth Leader in the British Isles. Then, the post of Shop Steward became vacant at my workplace of ‘Harrison Gardeners’ and my name was put forward as the new ‘Shop Steward’. Becoming a Shop Steward at my age of 18 years over a workforce of a few hundred men and women was so unusual that my appointment as ‘Great Britain’s Youngest Shop Steward’ received national press coverage, just as the details of my horrific accident at the age of 11 years also had.

My Canadian plans were almost thrown off course when the textile union for whom I was a shop steward representative wanted to ‘fast track’ me by providing me with a sponsored degree course at ‘Ruskin College’. Ruskin College, originally known as Ruskin Hall, Oxford, is an independent educational institution in Oxford, England. It is named after the essayist and social critic, John Ruskin, and specialises in providing educational opportunities for adults with few or no qualifications. It has been used over many years to further the educational status of some shop stewards who the trade unions wanted to ‘fast track’ in their organisation.

This offer equally surprised and gratified me, but my plans to travel abroad had been part of my dreams since the age of 12 years, and so I declined the opportunity of a sponsored degree course at ‘Ruskin College’. To keep my plans of travel on course, I needed to avoid the traditional course of becoming a father and husband in my early twenties. During the early 1960s, it was common for young men and women to have married by the age of 21 years. Neither was it unusual to have parented two snotty-nosed children before one’s 23rd birthday! If I were to keep my travel dreams intact, I needed to remain single by 21 years of age. To achieve this, given my romantic inclinations to fall in love with every beautiful young woman I dated, I needed to remain emotionally unattached. Thus, I would never have more than a couple of dates with the same girl and would change partners every month whether I liked them/ loved them or not.

Between the ages of 18 and 21 years, before I went to Canada for a few years, I worked and played hard in all respects. I may have played hard and fast but was never loose with the young women I dated. It became apparent to me that I was a young man who constantly preferred to be ‘in love’ than ‘out of love’. However, better still than ‘being in love’, I found, was ‘falling in love’!

My dear mother always had lovely long black hair in her youth and throughout the early years of her marriage. I grew up loving my mother dearly. Consequently, it wasn’t surprising to discover in my teens that only long black hair on the head of any young woman I ever dated, was a prerequisite to my being instantly attracted to them. I realise that it must have been some Freudian influence at work in the process of my subconscious selection of the perfect young woman, and while the many beautiful females I was to date may have included a few who had different hair colour, every woman I ever loved had long black hair and brown or hazel eyes.

I will never forget one young woman I knew briefly who reminds me of today’s song I sing. She was aged 20 when I was 18 years old and we met at a dance hall in Halifax where the gang from Windybank Estate would go bopping weekly. It was a dance hall that essentially practised a form of self-selecting colour-segregation between its weekly patrons. The shape of the dance hall was circular, and the floor was wooden, which would bounce at its centre with the weight of the boppers on it. At one side of the dance floor would be the Jamaicans who made up around half of the dancers, and at the other side of the dance floor were the white-skinned native dancers, making up the other half. The circular dance floor was divided into two notional half-moon segments. The black and white dancers each kept to their own side, and apart from a few white female dancers who dated Jamaicans and danced with them, black and white boppers danced with their own kind in their own half-moon segment of the wooden dance floor.

Every now and then, a skirmish would break out between a group of white-skinned dancers and some Jamaican dancers, and whenever this happened, it did not take long before the entire dance hall was fighting in lumps. The police would naturally be called by the dance hall owners to break up the disturbance, but the Halifax Bobby had too much Yorkshire common sense to tread in a tin of treacle with his big feet. The cops had no intention of getting stuck in the middle of a race rumble and tumble during a traditionally quiet mid-week evening when they’d normally be sitting in a country lane in their police cars scoffing a bag of chips. The police would arrive at the dance hall in large numbers but did not immediately enter. Instead, the police would deliberately wait outside for fifteen minutes as the brawlers inside knocked seven bells out of each other.

Some young men came to the Halifax dance hall to bop on the bouncy wooden floor, some came for the opportunity of hooking up with a good-looking woman, some came for a good fight to round off the evening, and some came for all three experiences.

One Wednesday night at the Halifax dance hall I saw my pair of ‘Pretty Little Angel Eyes’ looking in my direction (as a couple is prone to do as they weigh up their chances of ‘getting off’ with each other). The young woman who was ‘giving me the eye’ was petite in build, with a beautiful figure and long natural blonde hair. I could not help but be taken aback by the sensuality of her invitation as she looked across at me. It was as though she was providing me with a romantic invitation that I could not refuse. Her visual invitation appeared to offer me the possibility of everything I ever dreamed of wanting out of a wet Wednesday night out in Halifax, without the certain promise of getting anything to write home about.

We stayed together for most of that evening and when we danced together, I immediately realised that it had been ‘her eyes’ which had mesmerised me initially and not ‘her look’. She had the bluest eyes I had ever seen in my life. Her eyes were strikingly blue and appeared translucent enough to place the admirer in an immediate trance. Her eyes instantly attracted, and like a love magnet, they drew one compellingly closer and closer until the two romantic forces touched into lockdown motion. Her eyes held the strong suggestion that it would only take one deep gaze into them to result in ‘the looker’ being enticed to dive all the way down into their blue-ocean seabed, and remain lost in them forever. Warning sirens started to ring, telling me that was I to dive deeply into such mesmerising eyes meant that there would be no coming back from the experience and that I’d might as well tear up and throw my sailing ticket to Canada into the sea.

She told me the name of what produced her distinctive blue eyes, but I needed to look it up again recently for this morning’s post. The young woman had a condition what I believe to be known as ‘Waardenburg Syndrome’. This results in the carrier of the condition possessing strikingly blue eyes. Sometimes the person may have two different coloured eyes or have two different colours present in each eye.

I have known many different types of women during my life who had wildly different temperaments. There were women who possessed opposite character traits, different hair colouring and shade of eyes. But only once have I witnessed what I now believe to be ‘Waardenburg Syndrome’, and that was in Halifax during the year 1960, where I found my young dancing partner with the ‘Pretty Little Angel Eyes’.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 27th May 2020

27/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to three people; all of who all live in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland. They are Tender Ryan, Anne Howard, and Siobhan Russell. Tender, Anne, and Siobhan celebrate their birthday today. Have a nice day Tender, Anne, and Siobhan, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Say You, Say Me’. This song was written and recorded by Lionel Richie for the film ‘White Nights’. The single hit Number 1 in the United States and on the ‘R&B Singles Chart’ in December 1985. It became Richie's ninth Number1 on the Billboard ‘Adult Contemporary Chart’. The track is not available on the film's soundtrack album, as Motown did not want Richie's first single following the massive success of his 1983 album ‘Can’t Slow Down’ to appear on another label. It was included by Motown on Richie's 1986 release ’Dancing on the Ceiling’.

The track won an ‘Academy Award for Best Original Song’ and a ‘Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song’. A music video was made for the song that featured inserted clips from ‘White Nights’. In 2008, the song was ranked at Number 74 of the top songs of all time on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart, commemorating the first 50 years of the chart.

The single was hugely successful in South Africa, attaining the Number 1 spot on the weekly charts and remaining there for a total of 30 weeks. It eventually became the Number 1 single of 1986 on that country's year-end Springbok charts, proving that, even during Apartheid, music transcended all racial lines. It also reached the Number 1 spot on the ‘Canada Adult Contemporary’ chart: ‘US Adult Contemporary’ chart: Netherlands (Single Top 100) chart: ‘UK Singles’ charts: ‘US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs’: ‘South Africa (Springbok Radio)’: ‘US Cash Box Top’ 100.

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When this song was first released, I was 43 years old and my youngest child, Rebecca was ten months old. For the first three years of her life, Rebecca (who suffered from bad asthma attacks), needed to be regularly rushed to the general hospital at Dewsbury. Usually, these emergency visits happened during early morning hours, and knowing that I could drive her to the hospital myself before an ambulance would arrive to take her there, I would dash off with Becky strapped into the car seat, and my wife would stay with our other child, William, and phone ahead informing the hospital that we were on our way.

The situation gradually improved after the first three years of Becky’s life, but until it did, we dare not leave our daughter in her cot overnight. Becky would sleep with me and her mum in our bed. I used to place her face down resting on my chest in bed, so that I could instantly know when her breathing pattern became erratic.

As children grow, it is in their nature to become naturally inquisitive. It is also in the nature of their parents to hold different views on which is the most appropriate response in several given situations. Children are prone to play one parent off against the other if they think they can get away with it, and should they ever discover that they can, they play the game to their best advantage. If ever Becky’s mum refused Becky’s request to do this or that, Becky would ask. “And what does dad say?” in a bid to breach the parental dam of agreement, and vice versa. If ever Becky’s mum or I said something to our Becky which she did not want to hear, she would immediately respond like a little smart arse asking the other parent, “and what does mum/dad say?”

While I would try to keep in agreement with what my wife told Becky anytime (even if I did not fully concur with the view expressed or action executed by Becky’s mum), my wife was often too relenting towards our daughter and would often say something different to what I had previously told Becky.

With regard to my own personal view concerning the usual differences in parenting between both a mother and a father trying to bring up their children the best way they think fit, I invariably feel such differences represent a biological and physiological force of opposition which is simply irreconcilable.

God may have made Adam first and then created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs, but when it comes to which parent has the final say in the area of child management, God seems to have placed more soft tissue in the woman's head and heart, and more spine
and much broader shoulders in the backbone of the man!

Whenever Becky tried to profit from such parental difference, I would merely say to her, “This is not ‘say you, say me’. This is ‘say me, say you’, and ‘you do what I say!’”
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 26th May 2020

26/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to ‘Pretty Woman’, Matilde Antunes who lives in Lisbon in Portugal. IT IS NOT MATILDE’S BIRTHDAY TODAY; it is just that she is such a lovely woman who writes beautiful messages on her daily Facebook page and is always sweet and sensitive whenever she messages me, Matilde, who is a beautiful woman both inside and out always looks stunning in whatever she wears or is doing. I'd wager that she would look ‘pretty’ even in a hairnet with curlers all over her head in at 7:00 am on a morning, and still in her pajamas. Have a nice day, Matilde, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Pretty Woman’ or ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’.This is a song recorded by Roy Orbison and was written by Orbison and Bill Dees. It was released as a single in August 1964 on ‘Monument Records’ and spent three weeks at Number 1 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ from September 26, 1964. It was the second single by Orbison to top the US charts. It was also Orbison's third single to top the ‘UK Singles’ chart (for a total of three weeks). The record ultimately sold seven million copies and marked the high point in Orbison's career. Within months of its release, in October 1964, the single was certified ‘Gold’ by the RIA. At the year's end, Billboard ranked it the Number 4 song of 1964.

‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ was eventually the basis for the 1990 film ‘Pretty Woman’ starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and the 2018 Broadway musical ‘Pretty Woman. The lyrics tell the story of a man who sees a pretty woman walking by. He yearns for her and wonders if, as beautiful as she is, she might be lonely like he is. At the last minute, she turns back and joins him.

Orbison posthumously won the 1991 ‘Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance’ for his live recording of "Oh Pretty Woman" on his HBO television special ‘Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night’. In 1999, the song was honoured with a ‘Grammy Hall of Fame Award’ and was named one of the ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll’. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it Number 224 on their list of the ’500 Greatest Songs of All Time’. On May 14, 2008, ‘The Library of Congress’ selected the song for preservation in the ‘National Recording Registry’.

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‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ was released the very same year that I went to live in Canada for a few years. It did not really register with me until I saw the film ‘Pretty Woman’ with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts as lead stars. At the time of seeing the film I was courting Jenny Downton, the daughter of the then, British Trade Commissioner to Canada. I was very much in love but eventually decided that it would be wrong of me to marry a young woman aged 17 who had enjoyed a lifestyle that I would never be able to give her. Jenny’s parents were good people who did not object to their oldest daughter’s continued relationship with a 21-year-old man, and they were wise enough to allow nature to take its course.

I must confess to always having an eye for a ‘Pretty Woman’. The more stunning in the looks compartment the young woman was, the greater and more exciting was the challenge. My mother always told me ‘You get nothing if you don’t ask, Billy and you’ll go nowhere if you lack the confidence and belief in yourself!” In many ways, mum’s message had struck home to me ever since being a romantic teenager who was forever searching the dance halls in Huddersfield, Halifax, Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike, Dewsbury, Batley, Bradford and Wakefield for the most beautiful young woman and the best dancer on the dance floor.

The time I speak of was at the height of the Rock and Roll era, and I could bop with the best of them. I was a good-looking young man but not the most handsome in the Windybank Estate gang. I was however, the boldest, the most confident and the most arrogant among the dozens of us who went dating, dancing, drinking, and fighting together.

Very early on during our dancing nights out, I noticed that while I always opted to ask the most beautiful young woman to dance from a group of girls stood together, my mates always elected to go ‘downmarket’ as far as the beauty stakes were concerned.

When I once asked them, “Tell me; when you are the first across the dance floor to ask one of a group to dance, and one of them is an obvious stunner to the rest, why didn’t you ask her?”
Their replies were most enlightening. Being young men carrying two sacs filled with testosterone waiting to be spilled, they always asked the females from whom they judged they would meet the least resistance to their physical advances at the end of the night. In their bizarre reasoning, the bulk of my mates genuinely held the belief that if they asked the most beautiful woman in the group to dance, she would say ‘No’, and if they asked a young woman from the group who was less physically attractive, then she would be more inclined to say ‘Yes’, and then ‘Yes’ again after the dance on the way home!

One Saturday night at Cleckheaton Town Hall where the gang had gone bopping, this same thing happened again. Six of us approached a group of young women and we each asked one of them to dance with us. As usual, I asked the best-looking girl in the group to dance and she agreed. During our conversation later that evening, when we were sitting at a table up on the balcony talking and generally getting to know one another a bit better, she confirmed something which I had long suspected to be true. She essentially told me that being the best-looking girl was not always a bonus when seeking a boyfriend or even a dance and that the more attractive in looks a young woman was, the greater the handicap! When asked why this was so, she simply replied, “Big boys don’t ask pretty girls to dance because they fear being refused!”

While I have never lost my eye for a beautiful woman or never wanted to be in love with one who wasn’t, I have, over my many years of self-ego courtship come to realise that beauty is much more than skin deep. I now know that while a beautiful woman will always delight my eye, it takes a wise woman to further my understanding, an intelligent woman to stimulate my mind, an independent woman of strong character to allow me to be myself, a non-snoring and fragrant silent-farting woman to be my bed partner, a sensual woman who can make me both find and lose myself in passionate ecstasy, and a pure woman to save my soul and steer me in the direction of ultimate spiritual salvation.

I thank my lucky stars that, in my wife, Sheila, I managed to acquire the full package of beauty, wisdom, goodness, sensuality, and pureness; all in one woman. And do you know the irony; Sheila, was the one to ask me to dance with her and all I had to do was to accept her invitation. Sheila’s mother, Elizabeth, was like my mum, a wise woman; and Elizabeth obviously gave Sheila the very same advice as my mother had given me as a teenager; “If you don’t ask, Sheila, you’ll never get!” The moral of this story is that Sheila asked me and she got!
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 25th May 2020

25/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to two Facebook friends; Dympna Brophy from Waterford, Ireland, and Lynnette Skelton Birch from Liversedge. Both ladies celebrate their birthdays today. It is of interest to note that Dympna lives in the place where I was born, and Lynnette lives in the place I grew up and stayed until I married in my mid-twenties. Enjoy your special day, Dympna and Lynnette. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Auberge’. This is a song by British singer-songwriter Chris Rea and was released in 1991 as the lead single from his eleventh studio album ‘Auberge’. It was written by Rea and produced by Jon Kelly. ‘Auberge’ reached Number 16 in the United Kingdom and remained on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ for six weeks. A music video was filmed to promote the single. It was directed by Nigel Dick and was shot at Bray Studios in Berkshire.

Upon release, ‘Music & Media’ wrote: "Rea at his best: the perfect combination of Dire Straits-framed vocals and Ry Cooder-styled slide guitar. The type of song to play loud during driving. Traffic will be much nicer the next weeks’. Billboard was to describe the song as being a "dreamy blues-induced rocker, with dark, Morrison-esque vocal delivery, rockabilly guitar backdrop, psychedelic organ vibes and light-hearted horn riffs".
In a review of the album of the same name, Johnny Loftus of ‘All Music’ wrote: "The rousing title track and its accompanying set-piece ‘Set Me Free’ move from searching, tentative guitar noodlings into full-blown epics, with the bluesy bottom end, blustering horns, backup singers, and Rea's own grainy vocal rumble."

I understand the song title, ‘Auberge’ to be a French inn or hostelry.

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There is little I can add to this song which ties in with my own background. I only heard the song recently for the very first time, but I was simply blown away by the vibrant beat. I fell in love with Chris Rea when I was first introduced to his seasonal song ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ many years ago. It was only recently, however, since I started the daily singing practice that I decided to look up other songs he has recorded. I was amazed at what I found. While many of his songs have few words in them to sing, the musical and guitar playing is simply out of this world. Many of his later songs have lengthy musical openings, followed by musical interludes and concluding by extremely long musical playouts. It is as though his singing is merely a vehicle/devise to showcase his guitar playing, rather than the other way around.

There is a familiarity with all of Chris Rea’s records that seem to be ideal for the drivers of any vehicle on the open road. In fact, he seems to have merely extended his ‘open road theme’ ever since he made it big with ‘Driving Home for Christmas’. I love his songs and music.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song for my Daughter: 24th May 2020

24/5/2020

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A SONG TO CHEER UP MY DAUGHTER, REBECCA, DURING THIS CORONAVIRUS SEASON.

My additional song today is ‘An American Trilogy’, which I sing for my daughter, Rebecca, who is in lockdown mode at her London flat. Becky is single and has a highly responsible job in London where she has been working from home. For the past two months, Becky has not moved outside her flat and the farthest she has walked is to her dustbin. She has had asthma all her life and is therefore within the more vulnerable group category. She wanted to visit and stay for a weekend this June but told her that was not possible during this lockdown period, plus my daily trips to the hospital in Leeds for deep radiotherapy treatment to my face, neck, and throat. Naturally, my daughter was disappointed as she has not seen me since Christmas week, 2019, and especially, like half the country, she is starting to feel fed up to the back teeth with her own company.

Let me remind you of a time in our childhood, Becky, when you made your dad the happiest man in the world and provided me with a treasured moment that I will always remember with fondness. You were aged 5 years old at the time and had just started (or was about to start) First School in Mirfield. Unlike today, your mood was always placid and you were at your happiest when you were either napping in the dog basket by the back door or being cuddled in either your dad's or mum’s arms.

My song I sing you, dearest Becky, is ‘An American Trilogy’ that Elvis Presley, the undisputed King of Rock and Roll made famous 24 years before you were born, but which has a close association between you and me.
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This song reminds me of one weekend night around 1990 when your mother and I had taken you and your brother, William, to a caravan site in Great Yarmouth for a week. The caravan site had been highly recommended by a family friend and master builder called Alf. The site had one entertainment hall, where all caravan site visitors could drink, dance and be entertained nightly. Naturally, with it being a family-caravan site, children were also allowed in the entertainment hall.

While I cannot recall the prize we won, my reward that night was to see the pleasure on your face when you and your dad won a dancing competition together, and the best thing about our dance was that you did not have to do a thing, except cuddle me while we waltzed the floor together. As your mother watched William at our table, I lifted you up into my arms and we danced around the floor to the song ‘An American Trilogy’.

You were probably too young at the time to remember, Becky, but I will never forget that moment and that huge smile on your face when we were proclaimed the popular winners. That precious moment between a father and his daughter is what I will always treasure, and that song makes me instantly think of that evening in Great Yarmouth. It gives me great pleasure to remind you of that Great Yarmouth moment as I sing for you ‘An American Trilogy'.

Love you lots, Becky. Dad xxx
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Song For Today: 24th May 2020

24/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Eibhlin Walsh. Eibhlin studied at Limerick University and she celebrates her birthday, today. Have a most enjoyable day, Eibhlin, and please leave room for lots of cake and suitable refreshments. Thank you for being my Facebook friend.
My song today is ’Silence is Golden’. This was a song recorded by the American vocal group the ‘Four Seasons’. The song was co-written by group producer Bob Crewe and group member Bob Gaudio. ‘Philip’s Records’ released the song in 1964 as the B-side of the U.S. Number 1 single ‘Rag Doll’, which was also written by Crewe/Gaudio.

British band ‘The Tremeloes’ later recorded a sound-alike version using the same arrangement, which reached the top position on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ on 18 May 1967, where it stayed for three weeks. Guitarist Rick West sang lead vocal on ‘Silence Is Golden’. In the U.S., ‘Epic Records’ released the single, which reached Number 11 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart and was one of the top 100 songs of 1967. The song sold one million copies globally, earning ‘gold disc’ status. ‘The Tremeloes’ also recorded an Italian version, ‘E in Silenzio’. The song was also covered by Swedish singer Jim Jidhed (in English) in 1989.

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My research indicated that the origin of this common saying can be found in ancient Egyptian manuscripts. In 1831, the poet, Thomas Carlyle, translated it into English. He wrote that the meaning of ‘Silence is Golden’ is closely allied to the concept that ‘Speech is Silver’. Hence, as gold is worth more than silver, so silence is worth more than speech.

How better would the world be if that truth could be flown within each National Flag and the leaders of the world would ‘listen to’ more than ‘talk at’ each other? How often have we all spoken without forethought and wished that hour words could be taken back in unuttered form? Take President Trump for example and his tendency to publicly pronounce to all the world and its neighbour his own view before he allows his brain to process the logic of what he is about to say. Had he counted to ten more often before he spoke, never in a million years would he have advocated the drinking of bleach to combat Coronavirus!

There have been many times when I was so angry or annoyed about something that another person did to me or said about me, and I was sorely tempted to respond immediately by either word, text message, or face-to-face contact. At such times I have learned to take the deepest of breaths and to not proceed with my intended action until I have had sufficient time to assess the pros and cons of what I proposed to say or do. So often in the past at such moments, I have been advised by wiser others to 'take a deep breath', or 'sleep on it', or 'don't jump the gun'.

Take ourselves for example. Consider how many times we have spoken in haste only to repent at leisure. I once worked with a wise old chap called Albert in a Brighouse Mill. While Albert had been alive long enough to know many more things than his young workmates could possibly have experienced, his wisdom came not from his age and personal life experience but flowed from his ability 'to listen to', and 'to take in', and 'to digest' the conversations of others 'without interruption or passing any comment'. Then, afterward, he would merely spit out and discard whatever rubbish he had heard and keep forever close to him any pearls of wisdom the overheard conversations of others had imparted to him. To Albert, common sense usually came from the well of basic knowledge drawn by the experience of many others, and the sound knowledge Albert always displayed lay upon the riverbed of his own total experience of how best to interpret and use the truth that fell from the mouths of others he listened to.

All people in the world who are more at peace with themselves are usually the ones who are most at peace with nature and the world around them. They are invariably the ones who are most at peace with their neighbour and the passing stranger. Far more is learned through their observation than their comment within an interaction. I have always thought that the most annoying interviewers on the television or the radio are the ones who never allow the interviewee adequate time to complete their response to what they were asked, before firing them another round of questions in rapid succession. Such interviewers are not really interested in what comes out of the other person’s mouth. Their prime interest lies only with the words they can put into their interviewee’s mouth. The aim of such interviewers is to trap and entice their guests to say something other than they wanted or meant to say!

As a person who has practised relaxation and transcendental meditation since the age of 11 years, and who has instructed both for over 50 years, I am only too aware of the benefit of ‘silence’. Merely taking time out in the countryside from the hustle and bustle of hectic city life is sought by an increasing number of people today for its peace and quiet.

On the other hand, many experiments have shown that enforced silence for prolonged periods (especially by children) can result in shouting, temper tantrums,, and bouts of screaming breaking out. I am sure that so many families with young children who have had to endure the country’s recent lockdown for a number of months during this Coronavirus pandemic will have experienced similar incidents from their offspring who have been kept away from their schools.

According to Dame Esther Ranzen’s research (the television presenter and founder of ‘Childline’ and ‘Silver Line’), thousands of older citizens whose partners have died, and who live alone, can literally go months without contact with another human. Some even die alone in complete silence, and weeks and even months can pass by before their bodies are discovered after someone finally notices the build-up of a dozen bottles of unopened milk on their doorstep and contacts the police.

As humans, our method of word communication with one another and all sense of understanding from which we derive sense and meaning can only exist from the presence of ‘opposite concepts'. Without ‘good’ there is no ‘bad’; without ‘tall’ there is no ‘small’, and without ‘rich’ there is no ‘poor’, and so on. Without ‘silence’ there is no ‘sound’.

So, while remembering that ‘silence’ at the proper season brings forth its own fruitful crop of knowledge and wisdom, there are also times in our lives when to stay silent can be to the detriment of self and others. Inappropriate silence can maintain an unsatisfactory position that requires changing; it can repress the truth, it can obstruct justice, it can condone all manner of wrong, and even lead to the ruination of another’s life or even result in their ultimate death.

Sometimes, the correct thing to do, and the only thing to do, is to speak out loud and clear, while on other occasions ‘silence can indeed, be golden’.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 23rd May 2020

23/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Debbie Wall who lives in County Kilkenny, Ireland. This is the Irish county where my father, Paddy Forde, was born and for whom he played soccer in his early twenties, before progressing to play for the Irish National soccer squad. Debbie celebrates her birthday today. Have a lovely birthday, Debbie, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Free Bird’, which is sometimes known as ‘Freebird’. This is a power ballad that was written and performed by American rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. The song first featured on the band’s debut album in 1973 and has been included on subsequent albums, including the unfaded-ending version of the original recording (featured on ‘Skynyrd’s Innyrds’).

Released as a single in November 1974, ‘Free Bird’ entered the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ on November 23 at Number 87 and became the band's second ‘Top 40’ hit in early 1975, peaking at Number 19 on January 25. A live version of the song re-entered the charts in late 1976, eventually peaking at Number 38 in January 1977.

‘Free Bird’ achieved the Number 3 spot on ‘Guitar World’s 100 Greatest Guitar Solos’. It is considered to be Lynyrd Skynyrd's signature song and is used as a finale during their live performances. It is their longest song, recorded at nine minutes long but often going well over fourteen minutes when played live.

According to guitarist Gary Rossington, for two years after Allen Collins wrote the initial chords, vocalist Ronnie Van Zant insisted that there were too many for him to create a melody in the belief that the melody needed to change alongside the chords. After Collins played the unused sequence at rehearsal one day, Van Zant asked him to repeat it, then wrote out the melody and lyrics in three or four minutes. The guitar solos that finish the song were added originally to give Van Zant a chance to rest, as the band was playing several sets per night at clubs at the time. Soon afterward, the band learned piano-playing roadie Billy Powell had written an introduction to the song; and upon hearing it, they included it as the finishing touch and had him formally join the band as their keyboardist.

Collins's girlfriend, Kathy, whom he later married, asked him, "If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?" Collins noted the question and it eventually became the opening line of ‘Free Bird’. Also, in an interview filmed during a fishing outing on a boat with Gary Rossington, an interviewer asked Ronnie Van Zant what the song meant. Van Zant replied that in essence, that the song is "what it means to be free, in that a bird can fly wherever he wants to go". He further stated that "everyone wants to be free...that's what this country's all about".

The song is dedicated to the memory of Duane Allman by the band in their live shows. During their 1975 performance on ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’, Van Zant dedicated the song to both Allman and Berry Oakley, commenting, "They're both free birds".

‘Free Bird’ is included in ‘The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll’. The song is also Number 193 in Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’. In 2009, the song was named ‘the 26th best hard rock song of all time by VHI’.

It has become something of a humorous tradition for audience members at concerts to shout "Free Bird!" or "Play Free Bird!" as a request to hear the song, regardless of the performer or style of music. For example, during the Nirvana 1993 ‘MTV Unplugged in New York’ show, a shout-out for "Free Bird!" eventually resulted in a lyrically slurred, if short, rendition of "Sweet Home Alabama’. In 2016, an attendee of a Bob Dylan concert in Berkley, California shouted for "Free Bird" to be played, and Dylan and his band unexpectedly obliged. The phenomenon continues today as numerous groups face shouts to play a song that very few guitarists are accomplished enough to adequately achieve.

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I suppose that ever since a very bad accident left me near death’s door as a boy aged 11 years, I have had to learn to be my own man and to take charge of my own life without being dependent upon anyone else. In fact, my wife ,Sheila Forde, is the only person in the world to whom I have surrendered some of my independence since I contracted a terminal blood cancer three months after we married on 10th November, 2012.

I had been knocked down by a learner-driver in a large wagon. The wagon then ran over me and stopped on top of me. For over an hour, my body was twisted around the main drive shaft as workers with planks tried unsuccessfully to raise it and get me out. I remained in great pain but was conscious throughout. On my way to the hospital I passed out. I remained in and out of a comma for around three weeks as surgeons fought to save my life. I would remain as a hospital inpatient for nine months, followed by two years at home unable to walk, while having been medically told that I would never walk again.

By the time I was received into Batley Hospital, I was on the critical list for a month with severe and extensive life-threatening injuries. At the top of the list of my injuries was a damaged spine, followed by a collapsed chest, where all but two ribs had been broken and enmeshed, puncturing my lung in the process. Both legs and arms were broken. My left leg was broken several times at the knee. I required over fifty operations on my left leg, leaving it three inches shorter than my right leg (whose five breaks had merely left that leg crooked in appearance).

Hearing a hospital doctor tell my parents one night during my first week in the hospital that I would be dead by the following morning (as I lay on a nearby bed in a semi-conscious state), led me to silently resolve, “ Oh no, I won’t mate!”. Then, after I fully emerged from my unconscious and critical state and lived, the medics told me and my parents that my damaged spine which had left me with no feeling beneath the waist effectively meant that I’d never walk again. This led me to say to the doctor, “Oh yes, I will!”

When no hope is offered to any person in one school of thought, it is only natural to seek hope from another direction. The English medics offered me no hope of ever walking again. This was a message I did not want to hear or was prepared to accept. So, when Western medicine offered me no hope, I looked to Eastern medicine, practices, and disciplines for my answers. I also turned closer to my God. For my remaining time in the hospital, I started to become a disciple of eastern methods.

I first read all about the body’s physiological functions and all about the connection between a person's brain and body muscles. I read, studied, and learned eastern disciplines of pain control, transcendental meditation, deep relaxation, along with the power of positive thinking, the power of imagery, how the mind controls the body, and the importance of muscle control, breathing patterns, body posture, and stance, to improve one's sense of balance and wellbeing.

Between the ages of 12 years and the present day, I have continued to read, practice, instruct, study, and research such subjects. I am now 77 years old. The upshot was that western medical knowledge told me that my spine damage would remain permanent and would prevent me from walking again. I also learned that having 'no feeling beneath my waistline' was the prime indicator of such a permanent handicap.

So, I used the visual exercises of eastern disciplines to imagine pain below my waistline (where no pain existed after my spinal injury); until one day, around seven months after my accident and hospital admission, I started to feel pain below my waistline. My spine had somehow reconnected and was once more transmitting messages to my brain. Feeling in my legs had returned! The pain I now felt was a more intense pain than I had ever felt, but I did not mind. To me, the pain was a good sign. Pain in my legs, however intense and hurtful, meant that life and feeling had returned to my legs. This inexplicable change strengthened in me immeasurably, my belief that one day I would walk again!

I was discharged from the hospital unable to stand or walk. I refuse to use a wheelchair to be pushed around in and my father made me a bunker which ran on four large Silver Cross pram wheels and which my sisters Mary and Eileen would push me around the estate in for the next two years. I was not too proud to use crutches to hold my weight when I needed to stand inside the house, and I used the shoulders of my sisters, Mary and Eileen, whenever I wanted to get inside my bunker(a form of unmotorised sledge on wheels that could be pushed).

For two years following my discharge from hospital I became a reader of books that dealt with body and mind subjects which many adults would have the greatest of difficulty understanding. I had the added incentive, however, of knowing that any increased knowledge I accrued would help me to walk again,

I had always been a clever pupil at school and was usually the top in most subjects. When my sport's teacher, Mr. McNamara visited me and saw the type of books I was reading, he knew that this was not normal in a boy just turned 12 years. So he arranged to have me Mena tested and I came out pretty high (140 IQ level). The Mensa test is not about intelligence levels; it is more reflective of the way one thinks, and is able to apply one's mind. For the remainder of my hospital stay, my teacher, Paddy McNamara was able to obtain my more unusual reading material.

When I lay in the hospital dying, my dear father who knew that I had always wanted a new bicycle promised he would buy me one if I pulled through. He probably believed that the bicycle would never need to be bought. When I did live, my father was true to his word, and even though he thought I would never walk again, he still went ahead and bought me a brand-new top of the range bike. It was a Raleigh bike with a sturmey archer three speed. My new bike stood in our house hall for four months as I looked at it and cleaned it every day. I had learned to ride a bike at the age of 7 years, but then I could walk, mount the bike unaided, pedal it, and keep my balance on it, and safely stop and unmount it! Now, I was unable to stand unaided and could neither bend nor straighten my left leg to propel the pedal 180 degrees.

For almost two years after having been discharged from the hospital, I would have my parents lift me onto the saddle of my bike and hold me steady until I was ready to move off on it. My father had attached a block of wood to my LHS pedal so my left foot would be able to reach. I was able to bend my right leg enough to propel the pedal 180 degrees, but only do this halfway with my more damaged left leg.

From my bedroom window, I could see in a clear skyline, 'Castle Hill' in Huddersfield, six miles away. This was an old castle ruin on the top of a large hill which could be seen from advantaged points up to 15 miles away. Cycling to and reaching the base of 'Castle Hill' in Almondbury, Huddersfield was my ultimate destination in my journey that would assist me to walk again.

It took me over two months to be able to cycle one-footed towards the edge of Windybank Estate (about 1000 yards)
During the first four months, I would have to stop at every road junction I reached, and being unable to balance the bike long enough, I would invariably fall off it. Once on the ground, I would have to lay there until a broad-backed stranger came along and would help me back on my bike.

Please note that there was very little traffic on the country and minor roads during the early 1950s. Also note that my parents had enough trust in me, to allow me to attempt to ride my bike, even if I fell off it and some stranger brought me back home. I have also been brought back home by a police car on one occasion and even twice in an ambulance. Each day I fell from my bike whenever I stopped it and could not steady myself or safely dismount my bike. Falling off my bike daily and bruising my bones became par for the course in my path of progress.

It is difficult to comprehend today, what a child or a parent could do in the early 1950s compared with 2020, In today's world, I would have automatically been removed from my parent's care and control because of their presumed negligence regarding my safety, and swiftly taken into the Care of the Local Authorities!

It took me two years before I could cycle to the base of 'Castle Hill' and back. In the meantime, my father had adapted my bike into a ‘fixed gear’ bicycle. This kept the pedals going around and used less energy to pedal them. I would pedal with one right leg and allow my left leg( that could still not bend or straighten fully) to push the LHS pedal around half a full cycle before being obliged to remove it. Whenever I forgot to lift my left leg from the pedal at the correct moment, I would receive a very painful jolt that would lead me to cry out loud in pain.

I will never forget the day ‘it happened’. It was about two years after my hospital discharge. I could now withstand my weight, and I had also started to hobble about in an ungainly manner on my two legs. That day was the very first time I had managed to reach the base of 'Castle Hill'. On my return journey home, I was as pleased as punch having finally achieved my goal when I passed the halfway juncture by the I.C.I. chemical plant on Leeds Road. Suddenly, something marvellous happened. It took a minute or so to register the significance of the happening in my mind. My bicycle pedal had turned 180 degrees and I had forgotten to remove my left leg from its pedal. I realised that both my legs had remained on their pedals throughout the full rotation. Even though my left leg painfully felt the turn of the pedals, it was able to turn full cycle also.

From thereon in, my walking ability and balanced progressed in leaps and bounds. I was able to return to school in my 15th year of life, although I was not able to engage in sporting activities.

Between the ages of 15-21 years of age, I engaged in every activity and sport I was able to do, such as boxing, wrestling, lawn tennis, table tennis, weight lifting, judo, dancing,, and long-distance running. I spent four evenings every week and half a day on Saturdays doing these sporting activities. I performed this rigorous exercise routine religiously for six years to increase my body balance and body stamina. I was left with a limp but I was able to walk and to engage in my favourite activity of all; rock and rolling (a more individualistic form of dancing with no set movements). While I was unable to play football again without falling on my backside whenever I turned suddenly, I was able to; play rugby on a Saturday afternoon for four seasons.

From the start of my personal journey at the age of 11 years when I lost all feeling in, and mobility of, my legs, to that day almost three years later when I was able to ride my bike properly, I knew that my life had been blessed. The very first time I reached Castle Hill in Huddersfield and was returning home on my bicycle and discovered that both my legs could pedal my bike a full 180 degrees, I knew that I was on my way and was determined that no person or any set of circumstances would stop me going and doing whatever I wanted to do.

That was the day I became a ‘Free bird’, and after gaining my wings there was simply no way that I would ever allow another person to ever clip them. The land, the sky, the heavens were no longer beyond my reach. I was a liberated spirit; a free bird who would fly where he pleased.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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​A SONG FOR CHILDREN IN LOCKDOWN - 22 May 2020

22/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to all children under the age of seven years old who are stuck in Lockdown and confined to the home. You will soon be back at school children. Until then, here are three songs for you. One is called ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. Another is called ‘The Unicorn’. The third song is called ‘Be Happy’. All the songs should cheer you up and make you happy.

I will let you into a little secret now, children. If you have ever seen a dragon or a unicorn, you will grow up a happy child. But if you do not know what a dragon and a unicorn look like, and you are unable to draw or crayon a picture of dragon and a picture of a unicorn, as soon as you lay down in your bed tonight and your head touches your pillow, your nose will grow as long as Pinocchio’s did and your ears will grow as big as Dumbo the elephant. If you do not believe me, wait and see. But if you do not want to live for the rest of your life with a long, long nose and ears so huge that if they flap in the wind, they will lift you off the ground like an airplane, get drawing a picture that looks like a dragon and a picture that looks like a unicorn or else……………..

Your mum and dad can be the judge whether you remain a lovely boy or girl or………become a MONSTER WIITH BIG EARS AND A LONG, LONG NOSE!
Love and peace Bill xxx



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May 22nd, 2020

22/5/2020

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I especially dedicate my song today to Sheila’s mother, Elizabeth, who died three years ago today, aged 89 years. She was a special person who was always happy despite her Alzheimer’s condition over many years. Mother Elizabeth spent the last nine years of her life as a resident of ‘Oakworth Manor Residential Home’. Sheila visited her and took her a walk every day. Although I never knew Mother Elizabeth before she developed Alzheimer’s, my lasting impression of her was that infectious smile which I’d wager had never left her face since she first wore it. God rest your soul, Mother Elizabeth.

I dedicate my song today to three Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. They are Margaret Drohan and P.J.Slater Pj Slater Senior from Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary, Ireland: and Liz Mcfarlane. Have a good day you three birthday celebrants, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Put Your Head on My Shoulder’. This song was written by Canadian singer-songwriter, Paul Anka. Paul Anka's version was recorded in August 1958 and released as a single by ‘ABC-Paramount in 1959. It became successful and reached Number 2 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’.

The song was again popular when it was played in a scene in the movie ‘Susie Q’. It was also popular when released as a single by ‘The Lettermen’ in 1968. This version peaked Number 44 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart; but it was more successful on the ‘Adult Contemporary Chart’ chart where it peaked at Number 8. Several artists have covered the song, including Michael Buble and Nancy Sinatra.

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I was 16 years of age when this song was released by Paul Anka and can remember it well. I worked at a textile mill in Cleckheaton at the time and each year, the work’s Social Club would take workers who had saved for the fare, on a coach-trip day-out in Blackpool. I only went the once but had a memorable day.

The coach was two-thirds filled with thirty women from the spinning, winding and weaving departments, and the remaining third of the bus passengers comprised of male workers from the mill. Half of the women were of married status, but for the purpose of their Blackpool day outing, most of them would revert to be single women for the day. All who boarded the Blackpool-bound coach had sworn in advance never to breach the ‘Day Trip Code’ of what went on, especially when married women removed their wedding rings before alighting the coach in Blackpool, and for the rest of that day conveniently forgot that they were ever married.

All coach passengers knew that the life-long penalty for breaching the ‘Day Trip Code’ was never to be allowed on future mill outings. And if by any means the unfaithful behaviour of any of the married women ever got back to their husband (and the miserable snitcher could be identified), the seaside spoiler would be ‘sent to Coventry’ (not spoken to or interacted with by any mill worker for a minimum of three months). In short, ‘what happened in Blackpool stayed in Blackpool’.

I was a good looking young man and there were two young single women from the Winding Department whom I fancied, if I got half a chance. As it happened, the romantic part of my day was entirely uneventful until the coach journey home. I thought that I’d hit it off with a 17-year-old woman from Scunthorpe in a pub on the seafront, but after buying her two shorts, she went to the loo with her two mates and never returned. She was obviously more interested in getting a few free drinks from a randy boy from Cleckheaton than getting kissed. The only reason my hopes had been originally raised was the bold message emblazoned across the front of her seaside cowgirl hat she wore that said, ‘Kiss me quick’. Obviously, I had not been quick enough to spot the teaser coming my way!

At the end of the day’s outing, it was customary to tip the coach driver. All experienced coach drivers knew that the bus passengers wanted all the inner coach lights turned off on the way back home, so in the interest of his own pocket, he would oblige. Some passengers who had drunk too much no doubt wanted to sleep it off during the three-hour journey back (which included the obligatory watering-hole stops), and others wanted to engage in some ‘hanky panky’ with the person sharing their double seat, without having the prying eyes of other coach passengers know what they were ‘getting up to’ under the Macs that conveniently covered the waist-to-knee area of seated couples.

I managed to get a seat near the rear, and as I walked toward the back of the coach, a young woman about five years older than me from the Winding Department invited me to sit with her on a two-seater. As the young woman who issued the invitation to join her was one of the two women who I fancied, there was no way I intended to look a gift horse in the mouth, although I was somewhat surprised, given our age differences. At the time, I was a member of a Skiffle Group that never got off the ground. The group comprised of workmates and myself from the mill and I was the group’s lead singer. Eventually, the word had previously got around the mill that I had a sexy crooning voice and was a good singer.

And there was I foolishly thinking that my attractive seat companion secretly fancied ‘making out’ with a toyboy from the mill. I should have known that what she really wanted at the time was not ‘a millhand to tickle her fancy’ beneath a light-coloured coat in a darkened coach, but a budding singer to serenade her on the way back home and send her to sleep with my dulcet crooner’s voice. I looked around the nearest seats to ours when the lights went down, and I noticed a few Gannex raincoats that were popular overgarments at the time, discretely covering the laps of a few nearby couples.

First sold in 1824, and made out of rubberised fabric, the Mackintosh raincoat (named after its Scottish inventor, Charles Mackintosh was to become a regular fashion item. During the years that followed, the Mackintosh remained in vogue and never really went out of fashion. By 1951, the UK textile industrialist, Joseph Kagan, upgraded the original Mackintosh raincoat by producing the ‘Gannex’; a waterproof fabric composed of an outer layer of nylon and an inner layer of wool which were separated by a cushion of air.

During the late 1950s, Mackintoshes acquired a bad reputation as they were frequently worn by dirty old men who indecently exposed themselves in public to female strangers. The indecent exposer would hide behind a tree, wall, or a bush, and when the female passed by, he would jump out and open his mackintosh to shock the female by revealing their exposed manhood.

On the Blackpool coach returning back home at the end of the day’s outing, however, the mackintoshes in use by ‘kissing couples’ were used to conceal naked parts of the male (and female) anatomy instead of deliberately exposing them! Thus, the description of ‘dirty’ became forever entwined with the word ‘Mac’ (abbreviation for Mackintosh) to became more commonly associated with devious sexual practices.

All I managed to get from my seat companion on my return coach journey home though was a polite kiss as she gently placed her head on my shoulder and eventually fell asleep after I’d sung her a few songs; one of which one was the song I sing for you today.

While my day trip to Blackpool did not quite live up to my teenage expectations, it did not deter me from the chase ahead. I was old enough to know that there were more birds with whom to nest over the years ahead (the term ‘bird’ was the 1950s and 1960s slang for young women). I knew that ‘one swallow never made a summer’, and that there would be many more seaside outings and summers to be had during my years ahead.
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As fate decreed, I didn’t have to wait more than a few weeks longer than that Blackpool trip before a part-time gardening job I was to take on for a Cleckheaton woman in her early thirties was to prove very enlightening in my romantic education.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 21st May 2020

21/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my son, William. It is not the anniversary of any special occasion today, but merely a piece of fatherly advice to my youngest and wildest son, William (likes to be called Will) who has lived in Australia over the past decade.

My song today is ‘Simple Man’. This the last track on side one of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s debut album pronounced, ‘Leh-nerd Skin-nerd’. The song is one of Lynyrd Skynyrd's most popular songs. Since the song became available for digital download, it has become Lynyrd Skynyrd's third best-selling digital song after ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Free Bird’.

The introduction to the song was used in ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Cold Stones’ episodes. The first half of the song can be heard in the 2000 semi-autobiographical film ‘Almost Famous’. This song is also used as the television theme song to ‘History’s Mountain Men’, and mixed-martial artist, Matt Mitrione uses ‘Simple Man’ as his entrance song every time he takes the arena to fight. The song was covered by country music artist Hank Williams Jr. on his 1991 album and the song has been covered by many artists.

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Put bluntly, my youngest son William is proverbially a chip off the old block. We were born at a different time and in a different age yet are governed by similar stars of destiny as we forged our way through life ‘doing our own thing’ and In ‘our own different ways’(often to the detriment of the feelings of significant others in our lives). We are each independent and individual. We do not ride the same star of destiny and never will, but our stars do cross and we are both guided in our passage through life by a star of hope for the future of mankind. While Will’s life has not hopefully been lived in the shadow of mine as an adult, my own behaviour, beliefs, and experiences, displayed to him and felt by him during his childhood years undoubtedly influenced him as much as other genetic parts he has inherited from me and his mother have. We were both born to follow a similar path of growth and understanding as travellers of the wider world.

In my day, the farthest a working-class lad like me could expect to travel was on a day’s trip by train or coach to the seaside at Blackpool or Scarborough. There was no such thing as flying to the continent on a ‘budget flight’ in those days for ordinary people, for as little as two hours average wage for a working man. In those days, only birds, bees, kites and the rich flew, and the cost for humans was exorbitant and beyond the average person’s purse.

When I went to Canada for two years in 1964-6, to travel around Canada and the United States of America, I was viewed by neighbours and workmates as being exceedingly daring and adventurous ‘going abroad’. I realised that I was incredibly lucky to be able to afford to do so. My own foreign travel was made possible by receiving a sizable amount of financial compensation at the age of 21 years, as the result of a life-threatening accident I had at the age of 11 years when a large wagon ran over me and left me unable to walk for three years.

The life of many a father and a son may hold remarkable similarities to each other as genetic traits are inherited and certain behaviour patterns learned; they also hold ironies. Both Will and I are following the same shadow of faith by:
(1) We each displayed too much anger as growing teenagers and young adults.
(2) We each are hopeless romantics who expect too much from our partners in life and the relationships we forge.
(3) We each are fiercely independent in our lifestyles, each being highly rebellious in our attitude in providing compliant responses to authority figures, and each being prepared to ‘step outside the box’ in seeking our own solution to the happiness and lifestyle we want.
(4) We each have always seen the strength and wisdom to be drawn from mating with, partnering with, and marrying diverse nationalities and dark-skinned best mates and soul mates. There is no area of discrimination that either of us has ever subscribed to or consciously practiced.

Where I went on to found ‘Anger Management’ in my thirties and to eventually become one of the country’s foremost authorities on Relaxation Training methods, my son Will has developed his own School of Yoga out in Australia. He is as pioneering in his own way today as I was in mine fifty years ago, and the range of his vision is as globally extensive as was mine in the 1970s.

Like I said, “He is a chip off the old block of wood’, but whereas the grain of mine that he inherited will always grow through him, he has already added a new grain of his own alongside. Hopefully, one day when he fathers children, his offspring will inherit a combined genetic pool of talent and positive traits we both created through the men we were, the men we are, and the men we became.

My son, Will, may be a chip off the old block but as long as he can go through life following the fatherly advice I give him in his dedicated song today, he will never carry ‘a chip on his shoulder.’ or 'have a prejudicial splinter in his eye' when he interacts with humans of any sex, physical or mental disability, skin colour, nationality or creed.

As the song says within one of its lines say, “Be a simple kind of man. Be someone you love and can understand”. Love from Dad xx
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 20th May 2020

20/5/2020

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

My song today is ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers’. This song was released as a single in 1964. Although writers cite a 1963 recording date, there is conflicting information about the studio location. Aldrin puts it in Chicago, while the Blues Foundation locates it in New York City. The song's distinctive guitar parts are provided by Dean Young.

Numerous musicians have recorded ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers’. Aldin notes the song "has the distinction of having been recorded by such unlikely musical bedfellows as Johnny Rivers: Elvis Presley: Chuck Berry: Jerry Lee Lewis and David Cassidy, among many others.
This now-familiar rhythmic chord progression of accenting the beat a la "Hi-Heel Sneakers" was in turn incorporated into many cover versions of ‘Big Boss Man’, and ironically influenced how the Jimmy Reed standard is typically played today.

In 2017, Tommy Tucker's single was inducted into the ‘Blues Hall of Fame’. In its induction statement, the ‘Blues Foundation’ noted that ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers’ was the "last blues record from the mighty ‘Chess Records’ [Checker subsidiary] catalogue to hit Number 1 on the charts" and its popularity as a performance number.
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As a female fashion item, the popularity of stiletto heels changed radically over the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. After an initial wave of popularity in the 1950s, they reached their most refined shape in the early 1960s, when the toes of the shoes which bore them became as slender and elongated as the stiletto heels themselves. It would be the 1980s however before the height of some stiletto heels could graduate to a pointed base six inches away from the shoe’s under-sole. For the women wearing them, it must have seemed like high-wire-walking on a pair of daggers! God only knows how any woman could walk in comfort and safety, and not topple, fall down and break a leg in the process.

The sure things that can be said about high-heeled stilettos are that women did not wear them for comfort or safety, but instead used this footwear of female fashion as a means of male enticement, to enhance the visual excitement and sexual pleasure of men, as well as carrying a legal form of a deadly weapon, in the event of needing protection.

I worked as a Probation Officer between 1971 and 1995. During that time, I came across many women who had seriously maimed a man by various means. In some instances, the women concerned were 'abused women' who had been pushed too far and had snapped in violent response, but the vast majority of women I am referring to in this post were women who could not control their excess aggression and who lashed out at a man for an unwarranted and often trivial reason.

I have known enraged women who came before the court for ‘Assault with Intent to Do Serious Bodily Harm’, and on a few occasions, 'Attempted Murder'. Such means used have included setting their victims alight: pouring and throwing boiling water or hot cooking fat at him: striking him with a hammer or some other heavy instrument: stabbing him with all manner of knives, chisels, screwdrivers and daggers: slashing at him with an axe or a machete: and using many more items found around the home and garden shed as weapons to harm. Given my experience, I believe that an innocent man has more chance of reasoning with a vicious rottweiler than a woman gone mad.

You may be surprised to learn that in my work experience, the most common weapon used by women assailants (against men or other women), was the pointed end of a high-heeled stiletto aimed at the victim’s head, shoulder or arm areas. I have spoken with nurses and doctors who frequently attended to assaulted men and women who came into A&E with a stiletto shoe stuck in a part of their anatomy! Many a female told me that she would rather have a stiletto shoe to defend herself with, as opposed to carrying a can of pepper spray or a knife on her person.

The most disturbing aspects of most of these assaults I refer to were often committed for trivial cause against victims who did not deserve such a violent response. There were a few beaten wives and partners, but as a general rule, long-standing physically-abused women rarely fight back through the use of force, but when they do, they tend to kill instead of wounding their abuser!

At the stage of preparing reports for the sentencing court, I was often astounded by the wholly unwarranted reasons why the accused women attacked the men or other women in question. Most of the women involved had been accidentally ‘bumped’, ‘pushed’ or ‘verbally abused’ or had experienced having a drink in a crowded pub accidentally 'spilt over them’. A few aggressive women even considered ‘moderate criticism’ or ‘daring to be looked at by a stranger’ to be sufficient cause to severely hurt or half kill the victim. I literally come across one ‘larger than life’ woman (weighing twenty stone) who ‘lost it’ totally when her husband went into the bathroom and saw her standing on the weighing scales, totally naked and letting it all 'hang out'. He silently smiled at the sight of her before he hurriedly left the bathroom in squeals of laughter he could neither conceal nor prevent turning into palpable mirth. Her response was immediate and was fuelled with anger and engagement. She deliberately pushed him down a flight of twenty steps. He landed at the bottom of the staircase unconscious and sustained a broken leg and other fractured bones.

I recall one 5O-year-old wife who lived in Holmfirth. She stabbed her husband of thirty years in the arm with a kitchen knife because he did not like the new dress that she had bought herself. I will never forget that incident as it occurred the very same day that a man in Netherton near Wakefield beat his wife so badly and broke her nose and one of her arms, just because he was less than impressed with her cooking skills. Upon arrival home from work one evening, she had presented him with a plate of sausage and mash for tea. As she had been cooking her husband's meal, her noisy and boisterous children were fighting each other, and with their distraction, she overcooked the sausages. Upon seeing the offending food, he accused her of having burned his sausages through carelessness and decided that she deserved to be taught a lesson. He beat her severely.

I prepared Social Enquiry Reports on both people to acquaint the court with the circumstances surrounding their offence, besides presenting the court with my assessment of the nature of their character, to assist the court with appropriate sentencing. The Holmfirth woman was committed to Crown Court for sentence and was eventually given a two-year suspended prison sentence. The Netherton man who severely beat his wife who presented him with burnt sausages to eat got 18 months imprisonment. Both women eventually left their husbands.

Now, just as a means of illustration how female fashion can be a powerful force of persuasion in all circumstances, consider this possibility. I’m willing to bet that had the wife-beating Netherton husband been served burnt sausages for his tea ‘by a wife dressed to kill and wearing black stockings and suspenders, and high-heeled stilettos at the time, he’d have eaten every morsel of his burnt sausage without the slightest complaint before suggesting that they ‘had an early night’.

Don’t mistake me as I neither condone the unacceptable action of knife-stabbing wives or wife-beating husbands. I am merely indicating the power of the high-heeled stiletto as a deadly instrument of both appeasement or assault!
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 19th May 2020

19/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to three Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. They are Ann Higgins from County Kildare in Ireland, John Casey from Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary, Ireland, and Jo Beckett from Warwick, Warwickshire. Enjoy your special day and thank you for being my Facebook friend. I got the idea recently that I would ask all people who share the same birthday on my Facebook song dedication if they will befriend each other. You three are the first group who I am asking.

My song today is ‘Longfellow Serenade’. This is a song that singer-songwriter Neil Diamond wrote and recorded in 1974. The song was produced by Tom Catalano, and included on Diamond's album, ‘Serenade’. ‘Longfellow Serenade’ spent two weeks at Number 5 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in November, 1974. It was Diamond's second Number 1 on the Billboard ‘Easy Listening’ chart following his 1972 single, ‘Song Sung Blue’. The song reached Number 1 in Switzerland and Number 2 in Germany.

Diamond described ‘Longfellow Serenade’ in the liner notes to his 1996 compilation album, ‘In My Lifetime’: "Occasionally I like using a particular lyrical style which, in this case, lent itself naturally to telling the story of a guy who woos his woman with poetry."

The title of the song is a reference to the 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Diamond chose to reference Longfellow specifically after recalling an instance in which, while in his teens, Diamond had used one of the poet's works to successfully seduce a significantly older woman.

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The very first time I heard this song was in May 2020. It was its title which initially caught my attention, as it seemed such an unusual and intriguing song title to include the name of a 19th-century American poet and educator. Longfellow was the first American to translate a couple of Dante’s works and I first became acquainted with his poetry when I read ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ and ‘Evangeline’. Paradoxically, I read these two poetic works when I was in my early thirties; around the time when Neil Diamond recorded and released this song.

Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of overseas. mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day.

Wife one and wife two died tragically. His second wife Fanny’s death was horrific. Her nightdress caught fire and despite her husband’s attempts to save her and she burned to death

There are several works by Longfellow that lend themselves to memorable quotes. The ones that most sticks in my mind are from ‘Evangeline’.‘Evangeline’, is an epic poem by Longfellow that was published in 1847. The poem follows an Acadian girl named ‘Evangeline’ and her search for her lost love ‘Gabriel’

“Fair was she and young, when in hope began the long journey: Faded was she and old, when in disappointment it ended.”

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When I was laid up in the hospital for nine months at the age of 11 years, I got into the habit of writing poetry. I always loved the English language, reading, music, and song, and expressing myself and feelings in poetry seemed to form the perfect bridge between these loves of my life.

Having had a life-threatening accident that prevented me from walking for three years, while persevering under the medical prognostication that my damaged spine would prevent me ever walking again, involved a 12-year-old boy reading adult medical literature about mind, body psych interconnections. When western medicine offered me no hope of walking again, I started to immerse myself in eastern medical ideas and practices. That is how I developed a lifelong interest in the power of imagery, the power of the mind, and the power of relaxation and deep meditation, and the power of breathing patterns, and the power of muscle control, and the power of body stance! All such reading was to help me understand the power of my own mind and body.

Between the ages of 16 and 30, I would read three or four books weekly. I would read ‘heavy books’ that few young men would even consider opening. By the age of twenty-three, I was reading Plato’s works and was developing an increasing interest in Greek Mythology that naturally led me on to reading epic poems. This interest in the epic poems of the past eventually brought me to read some of Longfellow’s epic poems such as ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ and ‘Evangeline’.

By the age of thirty, I would spend all my spare money on buying books and had a library of 7,000 by the age of forty. Between the ages of 25-40, I would read five books every week of every year and I refused to have a television in the house when I married at the age of twenty-six and bought my first one for the home ten years later when our two children were born.

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Paradoxically, having had my growth stunted following my accident and over fifty operations on my legs, I was to live out the rest of my life with the top body half of a six-footer and beneath the waist to the ground of a five-footer. So, as Longfellow may have put it, I finished up a five-foot-five 'shortfellow!'

The conclusion of this literary interest in my life eventually led me to write 65 of my own books. I allowed all profit from their sales to go to charitable causes, and between 1990 and 2002, 840 Famous people and celebrities read from my books in Yorkshire school assemblies. Some very famous world celebrities supported and praised my work and personally phoned me; the most notable being the late Princess Diana and the late South African President, Nelson Mandela. Through all this free publicity and daily press and media coverage of my writings and the hundreds of celebrity readers accepting my invitation to read from my books in Yorkshire schools, over £200,000 was given to charity from all sales profit(this to continue in perpetuity,by donating all the profit from every book of mine sold).

While I will always have a book on the go, two experiences in my life were to alter my perception of owning books after the age of forty. When I first got divorced, I left all assets and marital property to my wife. I was left penniless and needed to take some drastic action. I sold all except one hundred of my seven thousand books. I actually wept as books I had paid fifteen and twenty pounds a copy was sold for three or four pounds each. I thought that I was losing my best friend.

That act did me more good than most other acts in my life to quench all thirst for future acquisition and ownership title. I essentially started giving away anything that I had that anyone else needed more than I did. I eventually discovered how good it makes one feel to give instead of taking. A book on Socrates writing about his idol Plato tells the story of Plato walking through the market place one weekend and seeing all the wares for sale said, “I never knew that there was so much that I did not need!”

When I came to live in Haworth, I made friends with my allotment buddy, Brian Moorehouse; a most gentle natured, good-humored, and generous man. Brian loves to give, give, and give. He rarely visits any house without bringing them something he owns and which he gives away. His most frequent habit, which I have since adopted, is when a book of his has been read by him, he gives it away and advises the person receiving it to continue the process when they have read it.

So, when I heard this song for the first time within the past month, I thought, “Now, that’s a good song to give to somebody as a birthday present”. So, Ann, John, and Jo, please accept this vocal gift from me, and in return (should you want to give me a gift also), please befriend each other on Facebook.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today - Medical Update: 18th May 2020

18/5/2020

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MY MEDICAL SITUATION MAY 18th 2020.

I attended St.Jame's Hospital in Leeds this morning to see the Radiotherapy Consultant and after examination and discussion, I signed my consent for a course of one month of daily radiotherapy sessions to commence around the end of May or ASAP thereafter. I was told that the neck dissection operation to remove neck cancer that I had a couple of months ago, revealed that the hard nodule of cancer lodged there (and which the operation removed) was very aggressive and had leaked and started to burst, thereby making a course of radiotherapy 'essential' to remove any further cancer still remaining and decrease the chances of cancer returning (as this cancer type is prone to). The monthly course of radiotherapy will require a facial moulding to make up a special facial mask with a CT Scanner inserted to locate the relevant areas to penetrate with deep radiation. This time, the deep radiotherapy will cover one half of my face, my full cheekbone, all one side of my neck and penetrating until it reaches my throat.

The treatment will be administered daily over 4 weeks and it will take several months afterwards before sensations of normality return. Side effects which are GUARANTEED to occur include constant tiredness, sore skin, unable to digest only soft /liquid food intake, a loss of taste, constant dry mouth, mouth ulcers and loss of future beard area.

Apart from the guaranteed side effects listed above, there is a POSSIBILITY that I won't be able to sing again and a PROBABILITY that I won't be able to sing as well as previous. It's a good job that I have already pre-recorded new songs to post daily up until April 2021. As for not being able to have a full beard again, if I am unable to have any kind of beard and I am left with a clean-shaven scarred face and neck, I can always do a 'phantom of the opera' and ask them to let me have the full face mould (or is it secretly a death mask) they will use when I get my daily dose of radiotherapy?

So, I better get up to my allotment and get some sun and fresh air benefit as much as I can before I start this next treatment process, as most of June and July this year will be taken up travelling back and forth to hospital daily to receive radiotherapy, and resting up at home when I return, by the sound of it. But let me warn you all loud and clear, If I am unable to sing again, I intend to replace my recorded song on Facebook daily by the loud ringing of a two-hundred year Dutch church bell I have for three minutes daily. I will call my chiming musical instrument 'The Bell of Peace, Freedom and Justice', and will ring it for three minutes every day until I die or until every country in the world enjoys 'Peace, Freedom and Justice'; or whichever comes first!
Have a nice day, everyone.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 18th May 2020

18/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my Facebook friends, Mitzi Shannon who lives in Bellview, Pennsylvania, and Yvonne Bodily who lives in Northampton, Northamptonshire. Both women are celebrating their birthday today. Enjoy your special day, Mitzi and Yvonne, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. This is a song written by Larry Weiss and most famously recorded by American country music singer Glen Campbell. When released in 1975, it enjoyed huge popularity with both country and pop audiences.
Weiss wrote and recorded "Rhinestone Cowboy" in 1974, and it appeared on his ‘20th Century Records’ album ‘Black and Blue Suite’ It did not, however, initially have much of a commercial impact as a single. In late 1974, Campbell heard the song on the radio and, during a tour of Australia and decided to learn it. Soon after his return to the United States, Campbell went to the office of ‘Capitol Records’ where he was approached about ‘a great new song’ called ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’.

Released in May 1975, "Rhinestone Cowboy" immediately caught on with both country and pop audiences. The song spent that summer climbing both the ‘Billboard Hot Country Singles’ and Billboard Hot 100’ charts before peaking at Number 1 by season's end. The song was ranked at Number 2 position for 1975 and it also topped the charts in Canada and several other countries.

After Glen Campbell died in August 2017, ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ charted in ‘Country Digital Song’ chart at Number 12.

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Hearing this song always reminds me of the few years that I spent in Canada during the early 60s. During my earlier period in that lovely country, I worked as a customer server of refreshments and fruit in the train carriages of the ‘Canadian Pacific Railroad’. I did not do this job for the basic pay, or to enhance my professional image. The $1 an hour pay would not keep a church mouse on cheese and the chances of starting as a server on CPN Railway and working my way up the corporate ladder to become the Chairman and owner of the railway were very slim indeed. No! I wanted to find the cheapest method of travelling as extensively as I could across Canada and some of the United States. So, I decided early on that unless I became a train driver, the most economical way to travel across the country by train was as a worker on the trains instead of being a paying passenger.

This plan could not have turned out better for me. I now enjoyed the magnificent opportunity of travelling across some of the most beautiful countrysides in the world at no cost on my regular three-day to six-day return runs across Canada from Montreal to Vancouver (3000 miles) and Toronto to Calvary (1685 miles) plus stopover times of one day.

Some of the nicest lands I saw was in and around Calgary which the Canadians know as ‘God’s Country’. Calgary is geographically located in the western Canadian province of Alberta. It is situated at the confluence of the ‘Bow River’ and the ‘Elbow River’ in the south of the province, in an area of foothills and prairie, approximately 50 miles east of the front ranges of the ‘Canadian Rockies’ and about 150 miles from the Canadian-United States border. With a population of 1.3 million people, Calgary is Alberta’s largest city.

Today, Calgary's economy includes all manner of economic activity in the energy, financial services, film and television, transportation and logistics, technology, manufacturing and aerospace. Calgary also has the highest number of millionaires per capita of any major Canadian city. In 1988 it became the first Canadian city to host the ‘Winter Olympic Games’. The ‘Economist Intelligence Unit’ ranked Calgary the most ‘livable’ city in North America in both 2018 and 2019. Calgary has been a top 5 contender for this title for the last 10 years.

Back in the day that I was there though, mention the mere word ‘Calgary’ to anyone in America and they would instantly reply “That’s the place with the best rodeo in the world, the ‘Calgary Stampede!’” And that is what Calgary means to me, and which my CPN train-journey stopovers enabled me to see during 1964.

It all began with ‘The Calgary and District Agricultural Society’ which was formed in 1884 to promote the town and encourage farmers and ranchers from eastern Canada to move west. Sufficient land was purchased five years later on the banks of the ‘Elbow River’ to host the exhibitions, but crop failures, poor weather, and a declining economy resulted in the society ceasing operations in 1895. Exhibitions started again at the turn of the century, until, in 1908, the Government of Canada announced that Calgary would host the federally funded ‘Dominion Exhibition’ that year. This heralded the birth of the ‘Calgary Stampede’.

The ‘Calgary Stampede’ is an annual rodeo, exhibition and festival held every July in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The ten-day event, which bills itself as ‘The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth’, attracts over one million visitors per year and features one of the world's largest rodeos, along with other attractions. In 2008, the Calgary Stampede was inducted into the ‘Pro-Rodeo Hall of Fame’.

Organized by thousands of volunteers and supported by civic leaders, the ‘Calgary Stampede’ has grown into one of the world's richest rodeos, one of Canada's largest festivals, and a significant tourist attraction for the city. Rodeo and chuckwagon racing events are televised across Canada. However, both have been the target of increasing international criticism by animal welfare groups and politicians concerned about particular events as well as animal rights organizations seeking to ban rodeo in general. None of these protest groups existed way back in 1964 when the rodeo was much wilder and the concern for cattle, horses and steers did not stir the nation’s conscience and concerns as it rightly does today in 2020.

Just imagine how it must have felt for a young man (the oldest in a family of seven children) born into an economically poor family and living in England, and where the highlight of one’s year would be a day trip to Blackpool, a ride on the Dodgems and being visually amazed by the sheer height of the Pleasure Beach ‘Big Dipper’ ride in the seaside skyline.

Now, imagine the same young man living and working on Canadian trains (forty or fifty carriages long) that seemingly went on for a mile. Then, imagine the same young man (the furthest he had ever previously travelled was to Ireland where he was born), travelling thousands of miles across the Canadian prairie and seeing the spectacular sights of mere mortals riding the fiercest of unbroken steers and mounting wild horses in the rodeo shows, as the watching crowd waited with bated breath to see a rider thrown from his saddle and be gored by the deadly horns of a crazed bill in a fatal downfall, or stomped to death by two tons of wild stallion!

Such was my enviable experience during 1964 as I watched that star-spangled rodeo, the ‘Calgary, Stampede’ in Alberta, Canada. This is what today’s song will always remind me of.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 17th May 2020

17/5/2020

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​I dedicate my song today to two Facebook friends, James Doyle who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary in Ireland, and Julia Kasyankova who lives in Kostroma, Russia. Both James and Julia celebrate their birthday today. I hope that you each enjoy your special day, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘That Summer’. This song was co-written and recorded by American country music artist, Garth Brooks. It was released in April 1993 as the fourth single from his album ‘The Chase’ and also appears on ‘The Hits’, ‘The Ultimate Hits’, ‘The Limited Series’ and ‘Double Live’. It reached Number 1 on the ‘Billboard Country Charts’ in 1993. The song was written by Garth Brooks, Pat Alger, and then-wife Sandy Mahl. The song was also Number 1 on the ‘US Billboard Hot Country Songs’.

On the 1996 television special, ‘The Garth Brook’s Story’, Garth talks about writing the song:
"That Summer' started out as a single guy and a married woman meeting at a party. The married woman being ignored by whom she was with, and they snuck off together. Allen Reynolds told me, "Man, I just don't find myself pulling for these characters. It doesn't seem innocently cool.

“I was thinking that he was right. Going home that night in the truck I started singing she has a need to feel the thunder. Sandy started helping me write the chorus and we got it done together. Probably one of the neat things that I love about ‘That Summer’ is that I think the song is very sexy."

The content of the song is about a teenage boy ‘far from home’ who goes to work for a ‘lonely widowed woman hellbent to make it on her own’. The woman lives on a wheat farm ("wheat fields as far as I could see"). The older woman slowly takes a liking to the young boy, to the point where one night she dons a dress "she hadn't worn in quite a while". It is then implied by the rest of the second verse that the teenage boy loses his virginity by having sex with a more than willing older woman. The third verse takes the now adult man back to the scene of his ‘coming of age’, having not seen the woman since long ago. Although the man has been with several other women by this point, it is always the widow woman’s face (his first love) whom he sees. Every time he passes a wheat field, he feels her hungry arms around him again.
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This song resonates with me, in part at least. I was a young lad of 16 years, and both romantic and passionate to boot when I first met her. I was a presentable young man, handsome enough in the ‘good looks’ department, both bold and daring by nature, and with a level of self-confidence beyond my years.

Because of a serious road accident at the age of 11 years, my circumstances over the next ten years was to make me grow up infinitely sooner than I otherwise would have. The road accident which involved a wagon knocking me down, running over me and trapping me around the main drive shaft beneath the vehicle’s undercarriage almost killed me and did cripple me. I remained in the hospital for nine months, and underwent dozens of leg operations, and was discharged as a cripple with a medical diagnosis that I would never walk again. During this lengthy process of learning to walk again, I would remain away from school for over two years.

After a brief six months attendance at ‘Dewsbury Technical College’ having missed so much education away from schooling, I found it hard to settle back in. So I left school at the Christmas of 1957 and started work in a Cleckheaton mill at the age of 15 years. Over the years that followed, although I mixed with my own age/peer group, I was in many ways, more comfortable in the company of people much older than me. It mattered not whether they were men or women, I found myself needing the company of older adults as much as I needed the company of young men and young women of my own age.

I worked at the Cleckheaton Mill about 18 months before I started working at ‘Harrison Gardener’s Dyeworks’ nearer the estate where I lived in Hightown, Liversedge. Just before I had started work at the Hightown Dyeworks of ‘Harrison Gardeners’, I was offered some extra money to clean up the garden of this woman’s home in Cleckheaton. She was double my age and had just had her 33rd birthday. Unlike the woman in today’s song, the older woman who hired me to tidy up and tend to her garden was not widowed. She was neither separated nor divorced. She had never married and reportedly never wanted to be. She was and always had been of singe status and was an intelligent woman, highly educated, and working in an educational/teacher capacity with young children.

Without going into her full background circumstances, she was of independent mind and had she not been a heterosexual woman who simply needed a lot of physical contact with males, one might have wondered if she was gay. Thinking back now, she may even have been of bi-sexual status, although I would not have heard of such a status at that time in my life. One was either 'heterosexual' or 'homosexual' in my book (please note that the terms 'straight' and 'gay' at the time meant entirely different things. Before I had worked on her garden twice. she invited me inside her house for tea and sandwiches she had made partway through my work.

What I had initially been led to understand was a once fortnightly gardening task on either a Saturday or Sunday afternoon turned out to last the entire summer months of 1959 (I did not have my 17th birthday until November 1959).

As the month of June 1959 progressed, every week I did my gardening chores for the nice lady (who had made it quite clear to me by now that she liked living on her own), I could sense that our relationship was gradually changing. While I had not initially viewed our friendship as being any more than one of female employer and hired help with the garden, as the weeks progressed and the afternoon tea breaks became longer, our conversations became more personal. I could sense a change brewing and I began to have teenage expectations of what could happen were I to allow what will be ‘to be’?

There is nothing more flattering, sexually stimulating, and exciting to a 16-going-on-17-year-old teenager than to know that you have physically attracted the thoughts and physical attention of a much older woman who is experienced in the ways of the world. The woman in question was extremely attractive, and she always dressed in highly fashionable clothes. She was at home in anything she wore, and it did not seem to matter if she dressed more formal or totally informal. Whether she wore a summer dress or a skirt and blouse or merely donned a pair of old jeans, all clothing items hung naturally on her slender bone frame and complimented her feminine body shape, making her look highly desirable to male eyes.

By week six into our gardening arrangement, our conversations had undergone subtle nuances that come with a change in the relationship agenda from strictly professional to more personal. The first sign of changing times I noticed was in the way she looked at me whenever asking me some innocuous question. It was evident to both of us that we knew what was starting to happen, and what would definitely happen if a halt wasn’t called. If things continued unabated, the only question was when? As one line in the song I sing today says when the young narrator realises that the relationship is becoming more intimate, “both needing something from each other, not knowing yet what that might be.” That sentiment prevailed to me as much as the woman in question.

I was at that stage of my life where I was more than willing to do whatever came naturally in such circumstances. She had assessed me as being a young man who could be trusted not to kiss and tell. I had told the woman during previous conversations that I intended to go to Canada and America when I was 21 years old and had no intention of forming any serious relationships with anyone beforehand which involved the investment of emotional commitment on my part. These plans of mine suited her entirely, and there was no need of any further conversation between us. An unspoken lover’s pact had been struck between us that involved 'no emotional commitment' now and 'no continued physical involvement' after the summer months had come to an end. Knowing that our sexual relationship was on a strictly once-weekly part-time basis made our understanding crystal clear.

The coupling between us occurred about ten times and remains highly memorable to me, being the least experienced lover of the two of us, and who was still learning 'on the job' so to speak as I made my way in the adult world. Soon after, around the start of autumn I stopped my weekend visits, and while we did pass each other in Cleckheaton over the next couple of years and said hello to each other, our brief association was never rekindled, and the flame of my passion was ignited elsewhere, as no doubt was hers. I had reached my late teens and I had no doubt that there would be ‘other summers’ over the years ahead before I got married and settled down to domesticity and started raising a family.

I did hear through the grapevine that she had employed a new part-time gardener by that autumn who (whether he knew it or not at the point of accepting the post), would be given extra gardening duties and an unexpected Christmas bonus if he was still around in December and played his cards right.

Enjoy your summer months everybody, especially if the present lockdown position we are experiencing allows you to get out into the garden. In the event of you being a single woman out there in need of a good gardener, I am sure you will be able to find one easily enough in the advertisement column of your local newspaper. But beware, the going rate changes from area to area and depends upon the initial understanding you arrive at.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 17th May 2020

17/5/2020

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SONG FOR ALL PARENTS AND CHILDREN (AND FAMILIES) WHO MISS SEEING EACH OTHER

My additional song today is ‘If I Can Dream’.

I dedicate my song today to any parent and child who are missing seeing each other due to the lockdown situation in our country caused by the Coronavirus pandemic outbreak.

Lockdown is particularly hard to endure if you are living on your own as four of my five children do. All my children are aged between 35 and 45 years of age. Only my son James is married with a family and living in France.

William lives in Australia and his nomadic lifestyle makes him more dangerous than most with his constant and extensive travel. Adam has worked in Care Homes for at least a decade and has personally nursed and attended to several residents who have contracted Coronavirus. Adam is invariably working 12-hour shifts and is genuinely fearful for his own continued safety but is totally committed to his work. My son, Matthew works in a food processing factory in Barnsley and finds it impossible to maintain a social distance between himself and other workmates throughout his shift, but needs to work. My daughter, Rebecca lives in London. She is presently working from home and told me on the phone last night that the only place she has been outside the house during the past two months is to the bin. Rebecca has had asthma all her life and is also in a vulnerable category of person.

Most of my regular post readers will know that I am aged 77 years, I have three body cancers (blood, skin and rectal cancers). My blood cancer is incurable and robs me of any effective immune system. Ironically, what all people confined to their homes or hospital during the present lockdown across the country are currently experiencing, I have experienced for nine months each year for six of the past seven years.

I, spoke with my daughter Rebecca on the phone last night and she sounded most unhappy, a bit depressed, and is generally fed up with the current lockdown situation and pervasive killer virus. Rebecca is my only daughter and she visits me the more often than any of my other children. She loves having a weekend from Friday until Sunday night staying at our house with me and Sheila every few months. We usually play rummy and invariably, I win! In fact, the spare room where Becky sleeps is called ‘Becky’s Room’ by me and Sheila whenever we are describing it.

When we spoke on the telephone last night, Rebecca was highly disappointed with my response. She has been confined to the house and her own company for the past two months and hasn’t visited me since last Christmas. She believes that the current relaxation of the lockdown and the planned return to school and work for many parents and children will bring about a second wave of the virus increase around mid-summer; effectively putting the country back into full lockdown where we started off. So she was planning to beat a possible feared 'second wave’ of the virus and visit me and Sheila for a weekend in June. I had to stress on her that wasn’t possible, given my age and category of vulnerability, and without sounding alarmist, that it might even be early next year before my category of person is no longer confined to the house, with no visitors allowed inside the house meanwhile.

My daughter was very disappointed and found this hard to accept. We both finished up having a weep. In fact, I only managed to get two hours of sleep last night. Rebecca knows that I love her to bits, as I know she does me also.

My most pressing dream now is to see my children again. Given my own health issues, I can only hope that my time is not called by the heavenly boatmen ‘to come back in’ without ever seeing any of my children again. I do not believe that will be the case, but I have enough realism about me to know that even the luckiest of cats only have nine lives to spend, and since I was born, I have now used up all nine of mine.

’Oh, If only I could give all my children a hug and a great big kiss? It is rare that I allow a low mood to overcome me, but even the strong have to bend with the weight of sadness occasionally or risk breaking the back of continued wellbeing. Please God, keep all our children, grandchildren and all family members safe from this deadly virus, and that the time will soon come when we are all able to safely meet again in a family setting once more.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 16th May 2020

16/5/2020

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​I dedicate my song today to my late mother and father. The occasion represents no special anniversary in their lives, merely a token of the love I hold for them both for bringing up seven children (of which I was their firstborn) in the harshest of financial circumstances, but with enough love to leave me with the happiest of childhood memories. Without your combined parental input, Mum and Dad, my apprenticeship from child to adulthood of becoming a decent person would not have been half as successful as it was.

My song today is ‘Rose Garden’, also known and covered as ‘I Never Promised You A Rose Garden’. This song was written by Joe South and was best known as recorded by country music singer, Lynn Anderson. It was originally released by Billy Joe Royal in 1967. The first charting version was by Dobie Gray in the spring of 1969.

Lynn Anderson's October 1970 release topped the U.S. ‘Billboard Country Chart’ for five weeks, and reached Number 3 on the U.S. ‘Billboard Hot 100’ pop chart, and also reached Number 1 on ‘Cash Box’ and ‘Record World’ in their ‘Pop and Country Singles’ charts. The song was also a major pop hit internationally, topping the charts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, South Africa, and throughout Europe. The single achieved the award of a ‘Gold Disc’.

Anderson's version of ‘Rose Garden’ remains among the most successful crossover recordings of all time. It proved to be the first crossover record of her career. The song became Anderson's signature tune and was one of the biggest hits of the 1970s, in any genre of music. Anderson won a ‘Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance’ in 1971, and Joe South earned two Grammy nominations: ‘Best Country Song’ and ‘Song of the Year’ in the pop field.

Anderson said, "I believe that 'Rose Garden' was released at just the right time. People were trying to recover from the Vietnam War years. The message in the song is that if you just take hold of life and go ahead, you can make something out of nothing, and people just took to that."

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This song could have been ideally recorded and released for my dear mother and father. They each had a hard upbringing and existence (my father much more than my mum), and in many respects, I suspect that my father did not live up to the rosy image that my mum had of her married years ahead when she was courting dad in her late teens in Ireland and dad was a football star playing for his County of Kilkenny before being picked to play soccer for the Irish National Team.

Mum and dad, being Southern Irish people, were born in the heartland of the Irish rebel territory. The two of them, along with my maternal grandfather who was personally involved in rebel activities following the ‘Easter Uprising’ of 1916 against the occupying English soldier loved the country of their birth. While my grandparents would never leave Ireland under any circumstances, unless they were ‘dead in a box’ , my newly married parents were economically obliged to cross the Irish Sea with three children to seek a new and more prosperous life toward the end of the ‘Second World War’ in West Yorkshire. Dad became a miner and mum became a bigger mother and baby machine; giving birth to seven children, of whom I am her firstborn.

Dad was the hardest of workers and was by far too harsh in his more rigid code of life, whereas my mother never changed from the day she’d been born and threw her rattle out of her pram ‘for a laugh’. My mother is best described as always having been a ‘ball of fun’, despite bringing up seven children in a household where my father’s wage of £10 and 10 Shillings per week was expected to cover £20 of essential household expenditure.

When it came to displaying her own skills, however, my mother was as deft a family team player as dad ever proved to be on the soccer field. Dad would hand over his unopened weekly wage packet from the colliery, mum would take the money in her hands,(and after giving dad back ten shillings spending money), she would run with the little money she’d been handed; waving her magic wand over the tenner, performing her magic, and getting us all fed and through the next week until the next payday arrived.

Like dad on the soccer field, dribbling his way from one goal post to the next, so mum also learned to be as evasive throughout the week as she dodged one creditor after another, telling them untruths and leaving house doors locked (pretended to be out)when the tallyman called for his weekly payment.

My mother’s greatest financial magic trick, however, was so effective that all Chancellors of the Exchequer thereafter copied it. For all my growing life, all the household food that our large family ate this week was always paid for out of my father’s next week (and presently unearned) wage packet, by an arrangement with Hightown Grocer Harry Hodgeson. This arrangement (which all the poorer residents of Windybank Estate used) carried on for 15 years, and fortunately, our grocer, Harry Hodgeson did not die and close up shop until mum also had three working children to improve the weekly household income.

By such means, Mum merely did what all governments have done since the 17th century. Like all governments, mum ran up a National Debt for the ‘Forde Family Household’; and like all governments of the day, the National Debt would grow exponentially, year-upon-year, until the likelihood of it never being paid off emerged. Like the governments, mum had two kinds of debt to manage, short-term debt and long-term debt. She needed this method, so she could best decide which creditor to pay first and which debt to either dodge or defer the payment for a longer period. How was she, and millions of other citizens in the country able to achieve this, I hear you ask? Well, just like all governments in increasing debt do; by resorting to issuing government bonds.

All financial institutions accept these government bonds (in good faith that they will one day be paid) to keep the global economy working. So mum took a leaf out of the government’s financial book. As governments issuing bonds effectively ‘promise to pay the debtor at a future date’, so my mum promised our friendly family grocer that she would also clear off the debt in the future. And just like the debts of one government are passed on to the next government taking office, mum told our family grocer that if she couldn’t in her lifetime, then he could have her bond that her family of seven children would pay him or his descendants when she was dead and gone. Just like the governments around the world do!

Like all mothers of her day, mum became a magic juggler of household finances and money management, and for the whole of my childhood, she always managed to make life go on for all of us.

Mum would work from early daybreak to early morning the next day, washing, cleaning, scrubbing the floors, ironing, sewing, drying wet-the-bed sheets, and making meals for nine people. Yet, despite this endless and demanding work-shift that would kill off three-quarters of today’s adults, she was happy in her motherly chores from waking up to going to bed if she was able to get four or five hours of sleep maximum each time she got to bed.

Mum loved all music and especially singing, but she could not hold a tune any longer than you or I are able to hold a red-hot iron plucked from the fire and held at the hot end. There were few songs she knew every word by heart, but that small impediment never stopped her singing them. She would simply insert her own words and sing out loud. She would sing all day long as she happily worked away. She would often sing the right notes, but unfortunately, each note would always be in the wrong order!

Mum grew up loving to dance but said that dad was an old misery who had two left feet and never took her dancing. There was a constant mischievous glint in my mother’s eyes, and like a big sister in a household of smaller children, she was always playing pranks on us all. She looked like a woman who was always game for a laugh or prepared to accept a dare. Whatever my mum was or wasn’t, she was a dreamer all her life, she was a ball of fun, she was a born storyteller, and she was a lover of roses; especially red roses.

I always remember the first week I earned a working wage at the age of 15 years. The working-class tradition at the time (whatever the poverty level of the family was), allowed the new worker to keep their first wage packet for themselves. On my way home, I called into a nursery near Windybank Lane and bought my mum a bunch of red roses. She was over the moon. Dad said I would have been better spending my hard-earned money buying mum some grass seed to patch up the lawn at the back where she hung out the washing and had worn down his green grass! Dad’s prime activity was cutting the lawn, at home every day and at the gardens of Cleckheaton Church three afternoons weekly.

Dad was forever boringly practical and whereas he would mentally consider himself getting credit points off God for helping to maintain the church gardens for over twenty years, mum knew she could only expect God to give her demerits for her weekly tardiness at arriving at Sunday services ten minutes late weekly and leaving ten minutes early to grab an extra cigarette outside. Were both mum and dad cut open after they died, written all the way through dad would be the words, ‘religious observance’ whereas all through mum would be written the words ‘romantic dreamer’? Dad would live the whole of his adult life constantly pursuing his faith in the way he lived, while mum would always look for the fun in life and pleasure in the joy of living it.

Every birthday and every wage day until I left home to get married at the age of 26 years, I bought my mother, some red roses. When I had plenty of money it would be a bunch of red roses, but if I were short of money, it would be a single red rose. It did not need to be a special occasion to buy my mum red roses, as every occasion was made special to her if she could have a whiff of her favourite flower. Naturally, I placed a red rose on the top of her coffin as she was lowered into her final resting place.

There has never been one year since my mother died in 1986 or one anniversary of her heavenly birthday since when I have not planted a new red rose in her name. Over the past four years, since Sheila and I started to improve our Haworth allotment, where we spend many of our spring and summer leisure hours, we have literally spent over £1,500 buying and planting roses there. Like my paintings at home, however many roses we have, I always seem to be able to find another space to fit another one.

I love you mum and always will revere your name and admire your capacity to appreciate all that is beautiful in all our rose gardens of humanity. I love you too, dad, and although you would never have planted yourself a rose, I do occasionally plant a yellow, orange, white, or pink rose in memory of you.

As you were such different people in my life, I naturally love each of you for different reasons. Between your parenting, however, you both left me a combined legacy of ‘wholesomeness’. Love from your firstborn, Billy, mum and dad xx

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 15th May 2020

15/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my (next-door-neighbour-but-one), neighbour Andrea Leathley and her husband Brian who celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary today. Andrea is the organiser for the 1940s Weekend that is held in Haworth every May. This is probably Haworth's major event of the year and is attended by thousands of visitors every year from all over Yorkshire.

This year, however, the event is cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown prohibiting mass social meetings and crowds mixing in public. Naturally, Andrea and Brian are disappointed but are resolved to make next year's 1940's weekend better than ever. If you attend this special weekend annually and you want to make next year's event the best ever, please donate that couple of £s you are currently unable to spend at the coffee shop or on a pint of beer at the pub. Your contribution can make a significant difference.

Andrea has to raise over £20,000 basic cost annually to get the event up and running. She devotes all of her spare time and every weekend of the year organising functions to fundraise the required amount. At the end of one year's dedicated effort, Haworth enjoys three days of 1940's nostalgia. The shops are decked out as 1940s shops, and every one of the thousands of residents and weekend visitors is dressed in clothes of the 1940s. From the park (where bands play and visitors dance in the fresh air), all the way up to the top of Main Street, bunting and flags fly overhead and the sound of the 'Forces Sweetheart', Vera Lynn can be heard singing wartime songs that raised the country's spirits during those dark days. Winston Churchill can be seen giving his wartime speeches as army trucks and vehicles filled with American and British military are parked all around. There is the local 1940's Policeman and there is always a Spiv on the corner selling his contraband war goods.There is usually a dozen tanks parked outside my front door and Andrea's and Brian's house. One year we even had the presence of a spitfire parked in the Bronte Museum Car Park. The end of the day is always marked by a fly pass overhead as a Spitfire zooms across the Bronte skies.

This 1940's weekend means a great deal to all Howarth residents and our visitors, but it means much more to Brian and Andrea than a weekend of wartime nostalgia. Ten years ago today, Brian Leathley wed Andrea Earnshaw as part of Haworth’s annual 1940s weekend. Brian wore his US serviceman’s uniform while Andrea wore a period wedding dress. The couple joined fellow members of the '101st Airborne' at their camp across the road for the wedding reception.

Brian, from Manchester, had been a member of the 'North West 101st Airborne Re-enactment Group' for several years. He got to know Andrea when he visited the war-weekend eight years earlier and she asked for a ride in his Jeep. Brian moved to Haworth to be closer to Andrea and they now live in North Street. Andrea became a 'nurse' in the re-enactment group’s 45th Field Hospital detachment, set up for wives and girlfriends.

The couple decided to wed as part of the 1940s weekend so they could re-enact a wartime wedding. It was a short hop across the road from the ceremony at West Lane Baptist Church to the reception. It was held in the 'camp' set up every year on West Lane by the 101st Airborne members. Brian told the Keighley News: “The wedding went well and everyone was so kind and helpful.” Andrea said some of Brian’s and her friends and families also dressed in period costumes for their wedding.

We all wish Brian and Andrea Leathley a happy wedding anniversary today. I spoke with Andrea briefly yesterday (from a safe distance) and asked her if she had any special plans this year as they could not go out and celebrate in the usual manner with the lockdown. Andrea simply gave me that smile of a woman's scheming brain in action as she replied, "Don't tell my Brian, Bill, I shouldn't be breathing a word, but let's just say that it involves two bottles of the best red in the house, and me wearing a shortened nurse's uniform and presenting my man with a promise he won't refuse!"

'Enough said' is what I say. All there is left to do now is to sing Brian and Andrea Leathley a celebratory song. It is
'Tonight, I Celebrate My Love'. This a romantic ballad was recorded by Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack for their 1983 album of duets, ''Born to Love'. Like Andrea and Brian, the song became an instant smash hit! Happy anniversary, love birds. Enjoy your day....and night.

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 14th May 2020

14/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Janice Jagger and Colin Jagger. It was Janet’s birthday yesterday, but I did not find this out until last night when it was too late to mention her on my daily singing post. I wish to correct that oversight today.

I have never met Janice in person but certainly intend to visit her and her husband Colin at their home on the coast at my very first opportunity. Janice and Colin moved to their present coastal home from Halifax a few months ago. From what I know about Janice, she has been a loving carer to her poorly husband for many years now and she devotes her entire time attending to his every need 24 hours daily; much as my wife Sheila does for myself.

In fact, I understand that both Janice and Colin have spent a lifetime caring for numerous children whom they effectively fostered and reared throughout their married years. There are so many people in this world, who owe everything they have, everything they have become, and everything they will ever be, to Janice and Colin.

When one examines the human sacrifices that anyone makes, it is those people who give the most precious of all their gifts to another who stand out like beacons of hope in our darkest hours; for through the giving of their time, their detailed and sensitive attention, their constant concern and eternal and unqualified love, they give all they have when they give over to others, their own life! Both Janice and her husband Colin fit this category of person better than any couple I know of.

If ever a couple deserves the title of ‘Mr. and Mrs. Love’ or ‘Mum and Dad’, it is Colin and Janice! And, I have not the slightest doubt that was I to physically place before them in person, every child they ever nurtured into adulthood and independence, the collective response shouted out loud and clear by ‘all their children’ would be what every child heard every day that they were in Janice’s and Colin’s loving care and protection: “I Will Always Love You’.

I have never met you both yet, Janice, but I love what you and Colin have done with your time over the years you have been together as ‘man and wife’ and ‘mother and father’ and ‘good friend and neighbour’. I cannot think of any better way to live one’s life than to live it in love with the people of your family and the nature and nurture that surrounds you. You both serve as a model of how one’s life can be best lived. You each remind us of how anyone’s time and emotions could be best spent, and how one’s unqualified love, concern, sensitivity, and assistance be gently dispensed to others.

On this belated birthday wish, allow me to hold up to the world, the mirror that reflects the selfless actions of yourself and Colin in your lives thus far.

My song today is ‘I Will Always Love You’. Have a lovely day. You both deserve it. Thank you for being you. ‘I Will Always Love You (both)’. Bill xxx

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 13th May 2020

13/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to three people who are celebrating their birthday today. They are my nephew, Marcus Thorp from Stoke-on-Trent, Mahboob Nawaz from Bradford, and Paul Dower from County Waterford in Ireland. Have a smashing birthday, guys, and enjoy your special day.

My song today is ‘Roses Are Red (My Love)’. This popular song was composed by Al Byron and Paul Evans. It was recorded by Bobby Vinton and was his first hit. Vinton found the song in a reject pile at ‘Epic Records’. He first recorded it as an R&B number but was asked to re-record it in a slower more dramatic arrangement, with strings and a vocal choir added.

The song was released in April 1962. It reached No. 1 in Australia, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, and the United States, and was a major hit in many other countries as well. The song topped the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ singles chart on July 14, 1962, and remained there for four weeks. The single was also the first number-one hit for ‘Epic Records’. Billboard ranked the record Number 4 in their year-end ranking ‘ Top 100 Singles of 1962’, and Number 36 in their year-end ranking of the ‘Top Rhythm and Blues records of 1962’. The song was also ranked Number 17 on Cash Box’s ‘Top 100 Chart Hits of 1962’.

In the UK, a cover version by Northern Irish singer, Ronnie Carroll, reached Number 3 on the ‘Record Retailer Chart’ on August 8, 1962, the same week that the Bobby Vinton record peaked at Number 15. It peaked at Number 7 in the very first ‘Irish Singles Chart’ published in September 1962.

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‘Roses are Red’ was a love poem that was used in verse on Valentine Cards that stretched back beyond the Victorian era. The origins of the poem may be traced at least as far back as to lines written in 1590 by Sir Edmund Spenser from his epic ‘The Faerie Queene (Book Three, Canto 6, Stanza 6). A nursery rhyme significantly closer to the modern Valentine’s Day poem can be found in ‘Gammer Gurton’s Garland’, a 1784 collection of English nursery rhymes:

‘The rose is red, the violet's blue,
The honey’s sweet, and so are you.
Thou are my love and I am thine;
I drew thee to my Valentine:
The lot was cast and then I drew,
And Fortune said it shou'd be you.’

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This song was released when I was aged twenty years and was at the height of my ‘pulling powers’ with beautiful young women. I was also only six months away from going to live in Canada for a few years; a dream I’d held since my mid-teens. Such travel was made possible for me due to a rather large amount of compensation I had been awarded by a court after incurring a life-threatening traffic accident at the age of 11 years that was to cripple me and leave me unable to walk for three years.

This song reminds me very much of when I was a 9-year-old boy at ‘St Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ in Heckmondwike. Even at that age, I had developed an eye for a good-looking girl. The two girls in my mind constantly were Winifred Healey and Moira Campbell. Never a Valentine’s Day went by without me sending them a Valentine Card form a secret admirer.

Winifred had long dark hair and she would precociously purse her lips unknowingly, as though they were always getting themselves into a state of readiness to be kissed by some passing boy. Winifred was my first serious girlfriend. We were each 9 years of age. Before we were 10 years old, Winifred and I said that we would ‘go with one another’. At the time, a boy and a girl publicly declaring that they would ‘go with one another’ effectively told all other pupils, ‘Hands off if you fancy Billy or Winifred as they are an item and will marry each other and have children together when they grow up into adults.’ Indeed, I was so serious about marrying Winifred one day that I stole a diamond engagement ring from the home of my friend, Peter Lockwood. The engagement ring belonged to Peter’s older sister, 20-year-old Margaret.

The morning after the theft from the home of the Lockwoods, I presented the diamond ring to Winifred at school. For three days Winifred proudly wore the engagement ring I’d stolen as a seal of our promise to one day marry me, and she showed it off to all her friends in the playground at every opportunity. Three days after my theft, a policeman visited the school after hearing about the diamond sparkler that a 10-year old girl was proudly showing off to all and sundry. Although Winifred was to ‘hold out’ against every advance beyond a kiss that I ever made before she left Secondary School, she was unable to ‘hold out’ even for a few minutes when the police started questioning her. She instantly ‘spilled the beans’ and turned me into the cops. She might have told everyone else in the school that we were ‘going together’, but when push came to shove at our very first police ambush, instead of ‘shooting it out’ alongside me, she immediately ‘put her hands up’ and surrendered; making clear her intentions of never becoming Bonnie to my Clyde and risk going to prison with me.

Unknown to me, when Winifred initially agreed to ‘go with me’, she was flying her future intentions under the false colours of a pirate flag. All her life, (along with her older sister, Mary), Winifred had planned to enter a convent when she left school and train to become a nun. Both Winifred and her sister Mary eventually kept faith with these intentions to become ‘Brides of Christ’. However, while her older sister Mary was to remain a nun, just like her childhood promise to ‘go with me’, as an adult nun, Winifred eventually found herself unable to ‘go with God’ either. Winfred decided to leave the Order and to ‘go with’ a Blackpool landlord instead.

Winifred and I met up at an old school reunion about fifteen years ago but apart from exchanging a few pleasantries, our meeting was brief and uneventful, apart from observing that I had weathered the storms of maintaining our good looks better than her during the passing years.

Moira Campbell, on the other hand, was probably the better bet to have staked my money and reputation on, but like most gamblers, I was to back the wrong horse and I put all my money on Winifred to win, instead of being more cautious and spreading my bet by backing two runners in the race to win. Winifred and Moira were both lovely girls to ‘go with’ but they were so different in physical appearance, character, and so many other ways. In keeping to my horse-racing analogy, I’d have to say now that Winifred was the fastest runner on the flat and over the shortest distance, but Moira had more stamina and was most certainly a long-distance runner as well as being able to jump the fences along the way.

Winifred was always beautiful in my eyes, and Moira impressed more as being a bonny lassie. Moira was Scottish through and through but rarely came to the parties held by other pupils on their birthdays as she acted as a part-time carer for some sick relative when she got home from school at the end of the day. Two things I recall most about Moira. She had beautiful ringlets that ran through her hair in a Shirley Temple fashion, and she was the sweetest singer I had ever heard. Her voice was golden to the ear, and I have never heard anyone sing ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ as sweetly as Moira did. I can never hear this Scottish song that Robert Burns wrote in 1791 without seeing sweet Moira in my mind’s eye.

I never met Moira Campbell again since leaving school although my sister Mary has reportedly seen and spoken with her on several occasions at the ‘Church of The Holy Spirit’ in Heckmondwike. My sister Mary informs me that Moira never married to her knowledge.

Now that I am much older and wiser, and in my 77th year of life, I can now clearly see that even had I stolen the diamond engagement ring to give to Moira Campbell instead of Winifred Healey, that Moira would have declined it, advised me to give it back to its owner, but still have agreed to ‘go with me’. Over the decades, I have thought often about this possibility and have to conclude that the more I reflect upon my childhood decision ‘to go with’ Winifred Healey instead of hitching my wagon of future intent to Moira Campbell, that I’d chosen wrongly.

I had done as a boy as many males decide like a man, to look for true beauty in the wrong place and with the wrong eyes. I now know as an aged and wiser man that true beauty comes from within the person and not from without. I also know that lasting beauty flows from the heart and soul of a loving human being and will shine much brighter and longer than any diamond sparkler will glisten.

I bet that Moira Campbell would have gone to the length of the earth and back for me had I asked her ‘to go with me’ instead of Winifred. I bet that Moira would have been the type of bonnie lassie to have kept her childhood promise to marry her man when she became a woman. I’d also wager that had Moira and I ever married, that we would still be man and wife, deeply in love and marching together every fine morning on the moorlands through the purple heather, playing our bagpipes in perfect synchronisation and harmony.

I recently told my beautiful and loving wife, Sheila how different both our lives may have been today in May 2020, had I chosen ‘to go with’ Moira Campbell instead of Winifred Healey at the age of 9 years! Although my wife Sheila doesn’t have a jealous bone in her beautiful body, after revealing to her this earlier account of the first loves in my life, Sheila secretly bought a saxophone and practises at least one hour daily in her bedroom, especially since the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown. I have told her a number of times that I am far too old now to consider swapping a sexy saxophone-playing wife for an old Scottish flame who is good on the bagpipes! 
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 12th May 2020

12/5/2020

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I dedicate my song today to two Facebook friends, Monty Scargill who lives in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, and Peggy Berry. Both Monty and Peggy celebrate their birthday today. Thank you both for being my Facebook friend and enjoy your special day.

My song today is ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’. This was the winning song of the ‘Eurovision Song Contest’ in 1976. It was performed for the United Kingdom by the ‘Brotherhood of Man’, in The Hague, Netherlands. The lyrics and music were written by Tony Hiller, Lee Sheriden and Martin Lee; the latter two being members of the band. The song became a worldwide hit, reaching Number 1 in many countries, including the UK, where it became the biggest-selling song of the year. Overall, it remains one of the biggest-selling Eurovision winners ever, and the biggest such seller in the United Kingdom.

‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ was originally written by member Lee Sheriden in August 1974. On bringing the song into the next songwriting session, others thought that the title was clumsy and reworked it into ‘Oceans of Love’. Sheriden was unhappy with the changes and the song was shelved. A year later when it came to finding songs for the next album, they discovered that they needed one more song and Sheriden again put forth ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’. This time it was accepted.

Soon after, manager Tony Hiller was keen for the group to try for Eurovision, now that the qualifying rounds had changed in the UK. Up till now, a singer was nominated to perform, but for 1976 it was opened to different singers to enter their own songs. ‘Brotherhood of Man’ put forward ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ and it was accepted as one of the 12 finalists. It won ‘A Song for Europe’ on 25 February 1976. The song was released as a single and reached Number 1 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’, two weeks before the Eurovision final was held on 3 April.

The bouncy jingle described the gently conflicted emotions of a young man leaving an adored loved-one in the morning as he leaves for work. The song's final line provided the twist: that he was leaving a three-year-old behind, ending with "Won't you save them for me...even though you're only three?".

The song is the biggest selling single for a winning entry in the history of the contest. It also still holds the record for the highest relative score under the voting system introduced in 1975 (which has been used in every contest since). After winning the contest, the song reached Number 1 in many countries across Europe and eventually sold more than six million copies. In the UK, it stayed at Number 1 for six weeks and was certified ‘Platinum’ by the BPI in May 1976, becoming the biggest selling single of the year. The song also hit Number 1 in several other countries, such as France. It also went all the way to Number 1 on the ‘Easy Listening’ chart.

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When I look back at my romantic courting years of the late 1950s and 1960s, I would have to admit to always wanting to be in the company of beautiful young women, and I rarely kissed any frogs in order to find my princess among them. However, I must also confess to having kissed a few young women who were too beautiful to ever be described as being a frog, but who were more than a few leaps away from being truthful with me. In short, they were not above board with me, and could accurately be described as having belonged to the ‘Toad in the Hole Club’.

I recall meeting one young woman at the ‘Ben Riley Dance Hall’ in Batley when I was twenty years old who certainly belonged to the ‘Toad in the Hole Club’. The young woman in question was a great bopper and could ‘turn’ her body at such speed that she made one dizzy to watch her on the dance floor bopping to a fast record. She spun like a top when she pirouetted her body like a ballet dancer on the spot but did not turn and twist her dancing body in the traditional rock and roll style that makes full use of a simultaneous swaying motion of the female hips. The distinction may not seem much to the reader who is unacquainted with bopping, but to all-male rock and roll viewers watching the lovely ladies from the side of the dance floor in their wide-flared dance dresses that have a circumference span of six feet when fully opened, it’s the difference between seeing the sights of heaven or hell!

To the initiated bopper or peeping-tom wallflower sitting out the dance, the rock and roll dresses of female rock and rollers are designed to deliberately reveal legs, thighs, black fishnet stockings and suspender belt, as well as knickers whenever the lady dancer turns and twists her body to the simultaneous swaying motion of her hips. As for the ballet dancing spinning on the spot, the turn is so fast that before the flared rock and roll dress has had the opportunity to fully open like an umbrella at operational circumference, the pivoting speed has started the flared garment turning back on itself, wrapping the dress around the dancer’s hips; thereby revealing nothing of note. Why do you think that the female ballet dancers wear tutus? If they didn’t, there would be no way that they could show off their clean knickers to the audience when they strutted their stuff on the dance floor!

Back to the young woman at the ‘Ben Riley Dance Hall’ in Batley. The female in question who I started dancing with was in her mid-late twenties and was a stunner in the looks department, as well as being a great bopper. The night went well, and I took her home when the dance had ended. When I dropped her at her house door, I kissed her goodnight and I arranged to see her again at the dance hall the following week. What a kisser she turned out to be. It almost took me a full week to regain my breath! I fell in love with her instantly and thought that the following seven days could not come around quick enough.

During the following week, I discovered from another girl I knew (who knew my date) that the young woman was six months pregnant and the father of her expected child was currently serving a one-year prison sentence for assault, riot and affray. The stunning young woman had never mentioned to me her pregnancy or the circumstances of the father to her expected baby who was waiting in the wings of Strangeways Prison for the happy event. She might have intended to tell me the following week when we met up as arranged, but having found out about her 'toad in the hole’ in advance, I decided it was more prudent to ‘cut and run’ there and then.

I had planned to go to Canada for a few years at the age of twenty-one and travel around some of the States, and if there was one thing that I did not need getting emotionally entangled with at that moment in time (four months away) it was the pregnant woman of a violent serving prisoner who was due for release before my ship sailed. I missed attending the ‘Ben Riley Dance Hall’ for a long while after and started bopping elsewhere. I was naturally disappointed losing such a stunning kisser, but so pleased that I’d discovered her ‘toad in the hole’ before committing myself any farther.

This song also reminds me of Silvia Hinchcliffe. Silvia was my next-door neighbour for the whole of my teenage years when we lived on Windybank Estate. She was three years older than I was, but she was also a young girl who believed that young teenagers should not be allowed to grow into male adulthood without becoming acquainted with the anatomy of a female’s body, as well as learning how to kiss a lady properly. Defining the kiss as having been ‘properly’ performed (according to Silvia Hinchcliffe’s belief) meant leaving the person being kissed wanting more of the same, and second helpings a third time! Every growing teenager needs a ‘Silvia Hinchcliffe’ to advance them on their slow road to manhood. Every growing teenager needs a Silvia Hinchcliffe as a next-door neighbour, a navigator and guide to the female anatomy, and a kissing instructor par excellence.

All new council houses on our newly-built estate had large gardens, ceramic baths that were fixed to the floor and weren’t made of tin and hung on a wall, an inside and an outside loo which did not have to be shared with the neighbours and a brick-built outhouse that was attached to the house itself. Our outhouse was one of my favourite places where I could get a bit of peace and quiet from my six brothers and sisters, as well as getting away from the prying eyes of my parents. I would spend many an hour up on the roof of our outhouse, especially when it was sunny or whenever I needed to ‘take time out’.

I will not tell you of all the things I used to get up to whenever I was up the roof, but Silvia Hinchcliffe would invariably join me on top of the outhouse whenever she saw me up there. It was up on the roof where Silvia taught me how to kiss sexily by entwining our tongues within a mouthful of mingling saliva. Silvia taught me much, much more than that, however, and it would not be either inaccurate or untruthful to say that had Silvia never shown me hers and let me feel it, in exchange for a glance and a tug of mine, then I might never have known what exactly what I was looking at the very first time I saw one!

These experiences of mine up on the roof of the outhouse with Silvia Hinchcliffe during my youthful years were simply invaluable and served as ‘my rights of passage’ from boy to young man, as well as representing the most pleasurable and sexually exciting of experiences any young boy still at school could possibly anticipate. At the time, we were each good-looking teenagers. In many ways, I was too advanced for my age and sexy Sylvia probably wanted a ‘toyboy’ of her own into the bargain to practise on. By the time, I went away to Canada at the age of twenty-one years, Silvia had started dating a man from nearby Robberttown, and when I returned from Canada a few years later, she had left her widowed mothers home and had presumably married him.

Despite everything Sylvia and myself ever got up to on the roof of our outhouse, what I will remember her most for is the first time I kissed her. She stopped me mid-stream, placed my hands around her bottom, and after telling me to squeeze her tight said, “Not like that, Billy. Not like that”. Without any warning, she looked into my eyes as though she was anticipating tasting the best piece of chocolate she’d ever digested, and after taking the deepest of breaths she started my voyage of the longest kiss in the history of rampant teenage lust.

The only way I can accurately describe the experience is to say that Silvia allowed her tongue to softly slither inside my mouth and then in one fell plunge, dive down my throat far enough to kiss my tonsils. She sucked the air out of my lungs like some sexual French-kissing vampire, so much so that I bet when she next took a bath, she would still have had the impressions of my hands (as I held on squeezing for dear life) deeply impressed into the cheeks of her lovely bum!

I will never hear ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ without instantly recalling Sylvia Hinchcliffe and our times up on the roof of the outhouse.

Love and peace Bill xxx


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Song For Today: 11th May 2020

11/5/2020

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I jointly dedicate my song today to three people: my friend Jolene Rae-Walsh from Huddersfield: Ann Marie Walsh Flavin from County Waterford in Ireland and Margaret Griffin from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland. All three people celebrate their birthday today. Have a lovely day ladies and leave some room for lots of cake and suitable refreshments.

My song today is ‘She’s Sexy and Seventeen’. This is a 1983 song by the group ‘Stray Cats’ and was released by EMI America in July 1983 as the lead single from the album ‘Rant N’ Rave with the Stray Cats’. The song was their second-highest charting single, reaching Number 5 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ singles chart. It also reached Number 2 on the ‘Billboard Top Rock Tracks’ chart for one week and Number 29 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’.

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I was 40 years old when this song was released and had just separated after 13 years of marriage. The separation was neither sought by me nor desired, especially as there were two children aged 5 and 4 years and their future custody was uncertain. However, once I had reluctantly left the matrimonial abode, I knew my wife’s wish for separation was right for each of us.

During the first few months of separation, like all people in similar circumstances, I was filled with disappointment, anger, confusion, and feelings of uncertainty about the future. Instead of turning to the drink to drown my sorrows as many potential divorcees do, I instead turned my energies toward the dance floor again. I had always loved dancing from my teens onward and rock and rolling was my forte.

As one weekend approached, an old friend called Geoffrey Griffiths from my youth found out where I worked and phoned me. He had been widowed since his wife had died prematurely from cancer five years earlier. His two children were grown-up children who no longer lived at home. Geoffrey was two years older than me but had always been a part of my teenage years until I went to Canada for a few years at the age of 21. We were usually found fighting together with rival gangs of lads, we attended dances together and we often dated in foursomes. Geoffrey had heard that I was recently separated from my first wife and thought that I might be able to benefit from a good night out to take my mind off other matters.

Geoffrey suggested that I have a night out with him the following Saturday at the ‘Mecca Dance Hall’ in Bradford. During the early 80s, all ‘Mecca Dance Halls’ were the most popular places where one could meet up with members of the opposite sex. Whether you were twenty-five or fifty-five, tall or small, fat or slim, dashing or dozy, married-separated-divorced or single, so long as you could do ballroom dancing, a bit of bopping, and had your own car, you would be guaranteed to hook up with a man or a woman of your liking before the last dance had come on.

Geoffrey and I took our own cars, just in case we both struck lucky by the end of the dance. We both obtained attractive women who we each drove back home in our cars. Most of my dates ‘out of town’ during my teenage years would witness me ‘getting as far as I could’ with my date while ‘telling them as little as was necessary’. Such patterns of behaviour were par for the course with young men then. Getting dolled up in one’s best gear on a Friday night, with money to spend, as well as being able to do a ‘Walter Mitty’ for the evening was great fun. It was the only time that poor chaps could pretend to be the sons of wealthy bankers, and mill workers could pretend to be mill owners or student doctors on a night out. Naturally, nobody revealed any accurate life circumstances to the young woman they picked up and wanted to impress, and you never revealed your actual name or where you lived or worked!

That night at the Bradford Mecca was an excellent night out. We had our choice of several women and Geoffrey and I reverted to our teenager behaviour of ‘non-disclosure, obfuscation and deceit’ with our dancing partners. It was as though we two forty-year-olds had started behaving like twenty-somethings out for a night on the town and to hell with where we woke up the following morning.

By the end of the evening when the dance was over, Geoffrey and I went our separate ways with our respective dancing partners. While I drove my lady passenger and date for the night back home, my mind was preoccupied with one thought above all others. I was not concerned in the least what time I would ‘make it back home’ to Huddersfield in the early morning hours but instead thought about how well ‘I would make out’ with the beautiful young woman sitting beside me, and who was clearly satisfied by her prize for the night. There is no greater pleasure for a young woman who has no doubt kissed a number of frogs in her time to finally find herself in the presence of a handsome prince (or whatever other status I pretended to hold that Saturday night).

My young woman told me she was in her late twenties, but she looked much younger and dressed in the fashion of a very sexy 17-20-year-old. She was a very talkative person and I am afraid that I heard what she said rather than listened to the content and central message. I returned to my digs later around 1:00 am, pleased with how the night had gone and glad that I had allowed Geoffrey to take me out of myself for a night.

The following day I worked in my role as a Probation Officer in Huddersfield; a vocation I had commenced ten years earlier. All-day long though, my conscience nagged at me. My mind kept returning to the evening before with the young woman whom I had driven home from the Mecca, and in particular, my overall behaviour to her needs at the time. As I reflected on her needs and my response, I knew I had not acted as well as I could have and should have.

For over ten years, I had specialised in being able to listen to and appropriately respond to people who needed to talk about their troubled life and negative experiences; just as the young woman whom I’d taken home the previous night probably wanted to. But, what had I had done in response fell far short of representative or being worthy of my usual behaviour. For a start, I had been less than honest with her regarding my identity and personal circumstances, and I had been keener to attend to the mutual needs of both our bodies more than giving full attention to her mind and what she was telling me.

Don’t get me wrong. I acted perfectly properly in so much that we did not do anything non-consensual or engage in anything that neither of us wanted to do. She wanted close body contact of a sexual nature as much as I did, but she also required to offload a pile of mental anguish she had probably carried around inside her for years. It wasn’t that she expected answers and solutions to her problematic situation from me. All she needed was to talk and have me listen to the shit-life she had experienced over the past five years.

Instead, I had done the usual thing that all workers do in my kind of profession when we finish work for the day. Being emotionally drained with dealing with lots of painful and sorrowful situations, we turn off our emotional taps until we go back into our professional jobs again the following day. It isn’t that we become inhumane; merely that we know we would ‘burn out’ in six months if we didn’t ‘turn off’ when we clock out.

Many professional workers in stressful jobs, have a drink or play music or watch a television documentary or read a book to ‘chill out’ and relax when they get home after a stressful day at the office. Some, like myself, like to go dancing and meet some pleasant and attractive company with whom to pass the time. We stop being ‘professional’ and start being more ‘personal’ in our responses. We know that if we become too intellectually attentive to what the other person is saying and listen too closely to the underlying messages they are giving out before we know it, we will have placed ourselves back in professional mode and we automatically start analysing and deeply interpreting all we hear and see from the other person. We might as well be back inside our office doing our daily work instead of having a fun night and ‘time out’ with pleasant company.

By the time I ended my work the day after the night before, I resolved never again to repeat the same mistake with any human who needed listening to again, ‘whether I was at work or at play’. While it is natural for someone who was in my type of work to drop out of the ‘professional role’ at the end of their working day and to stop being a Probation Officer, we should never stop being a sensitive human being. It behoves us all, therefore, to always respond in a more humane way in whatever situation we find ourselves in. Often, employing one’s problem-solving talents is unnecessary and lending a genuine listening ear is all that is required!

Emotions are there to be expressed by one person and to be listened and appropriately responded to by another person. They are part of our human makeup and were never designed to be like a tap, to be switched on and off at will. Emotions are the best and most beautiful things in the world that cannot be seen or even touched, yet they remain so powerful within the wheel of life. They generate feelings and better understanding between two people. The emotion that can break a heart can also heal it. just as the listening ear can also be deafened through insensitivity of the situation.

I had been ‘guilty’ of not using the God-given gifts of listening, understanding, and counselling; and it should not have mattered whether the young woman was an attractive date in my car or a client in my office with a similar problem disturbing her equilibrium. I should have known at the time that my response was much less than what it should have been, just as I knew that unexpressed emotions will never die but are merely buried alive to later re-emerge in uglier and more damaging ways.

Even though my ‘Mecca moment’ involved a woman aged around twenty-seven, when I looked at her that night in the car, and she looked back at me displaying the same desire, I lost the real person in me as well as the real person before me, and I only saw a beautiful looking woman in her late twenties who looked ‘sexy and seventeen’ instead of a twenty-seven-year-old sexy woman who had experienced a shit life since the age of seventeen.
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Love and peace Bill xxx
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