Blog Archives - FordeFables

Song For Today: 30th June 2019

30/6/2019

Today’s song is ‘Show Me’. This song was the title track of the 1967 album by Joe Tex, who also wrote the song. The single was Joe Tex's fourteenth release to make the US R&B chart. ‘Show Me’ went to Number 24 on the R&B chart and Number 35 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’.

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This song reveals the secret ingredient of all loving relationships, especially when a ‘good man’ falls in love with a ‘good woman’. When this relationship occurs, all that is left to do for the couple is to look forward to a ‘good life’ ahead.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 29th June 2019

29/6/2019

Today’s song is ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ This is a song by the Swedish band ABBA. It was recorded in August 1979 in order to help promote their North American and European tour of that year and was released on ‘ABBA's Greatest Hits Volume 2’ album as the brand-new track.

Written and composed by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, the lead vocal was sung by Agnetha Fältskog. Fältskog. as the narrator, weaves the image of a lonely young woman who longs for a romantic relationship and views her loneliness as forbidding darkness of night, even drawing parallels to how the happy endings of movie stars are so different from her own existence. The melody line of the song was played on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer.

'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)' was another highly successful song for ABBA. It hit Number 1 in Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, and Switzerland, while reaching the Top 3 in Austria, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Norway. It also proved to be ABBA's most successful song in Japan, hitting Number 17.

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I’d been a Probation Officer working in Huddersfield for the previous seven years when this song was released and became a popular play in Great Britain. Like the rest of the world (at least those with musical discernment), it was obvious to me that this group composed and sung songs that were so intricately put together that their success would be worldwide and that their records would be played decades and decades after all the group finally rested on the other side of the green sod.

Since I have been engaged in singing practice over the past fifteen months, I have found the songs of ABBA some of the most difficult of all to sing.

As to the message of the song, it is something we all want in our lives.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 28th June 2019

28/6/2019

Today’s song is ‘It’s Only Make Belief’. This song was written by Jack Nance and American country music singer, Conway Twitty. The song was released in July 1958. The single topped both U.S. and the UK Singles Chart. It also was Conway Twitty's only Number 1 single on the pop charts of either country. The single was a hit in 22 different countries and sold over 8 million copies.
This song has been covered by numerous noted singers such as: The Hollies, Billy Fury and Glen Campbell to name but a few.

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Like myself at the age of twenty-one years, Conway Twitty had gone to live in Canada because he believed it was the ‘Promised Land’ for music and up-and-coming singers. The song was released in my 15th year of life. The previous three years had witnessed my world being turned upside down after having been run over by a wagon and left with my twisted body wound around the main drive axle shaft until I was freed an hour later.

My multiple injuries involved almost every bone in my body broken and a damaged spine and a lung puncture; injuries that brought me to death’s door. My parents were told over my first three weeks in the hospital that I would die. I’d been unconscious for many days and was on the danger list for over one month before I discovered that having no feeling below my waistline indicated my spine to have been irreparably damaged in the accident and that I’d never walk again.

In the days of 1954, all hospitals were run by Matrons, Consultants, Doctors, Medical Juniors, Sisters, and Nurses. Down at the bottom of the hierarchy was the ‘Orderly’. The Orderly was an attendant in a hospital who was responsible for the non-medical care of patients and the maintenance of order and cleanliness in the ward. While part of their role was to mop the floor, wash all the surfaces, wash out the bedpans, clean out all the patient’s bedside lockers and attend to any request the patient might make, they were far more important than these mere tasks suggested.

They provided an important thing that hospitals lack today (largely due to the many administrative changes since the 1950s and insufficient funding resources to meet current levels of patient needs). They provided a human face who you saw daily, someone who had the time and inclination to talk to you, a person who would go out of their way to attend to your every need if at all possible: someone who did not remain in that safe corridor of ‘professional detachment’, but who instead spoke with you like a good neighbour or best friend might!

After I had been in the hospital a month or thereabouts and had been removed from the danger list, although I was mightily aware of the pain everywhere in the upper half of my body, I could feel none below my waistline. Both of my legs had been operated on several times to straighten them out, and naturally, it never entered my mind that I’d never be able to walk on them again. Although my parents had been told this news earlier, they left it to the doctors to explain it to me and answer the questions they knew I’d have.

I’ll never forget that morning in 1954 when my hospital consultant accompanied by two other doctors in white coats and a stern looking matron (in a shade of blue that suited her prevailing mood) stood at the end of my hospital bed. I had been moved out of the sideward a few days earlier into the Male Adult Ward of Batley Hospital. In the adjacent bed was a hospital patient bandaged from head to foot. He’d been a war correspondent who’d had a horrific accident and broke his back. He was a close friend to the Jazz celebrities of the day, Humphrey Lyttleton, Johnnie Dankworth and Cleo Laine, and it pained him immensely to know that his love of Jazz would never see him dance to it again. He’d been told he'd never walk again. He did, however, introduce me to jazz.

That morning, my world fell apart when the hospital consultant told me that I’d never walk again. My father had, in his twenties, played international football for his country of Southern Ireland and I (also having good soccer skills, and having been born in Southern Ireland) had also dreamed of one day playing internationally like my father before me. I instantly welled up in tears and after the medics had left my bedside, I broke down and cried into my pillow.

A few minutes later, the Orderly called Gwen saw me in tears and after silently approaching my bedside with half of her usual wide smile, she simply cuddled me as much as my body dressings, hospital attachments to my broken arms and plaster-of-Paris moulded chest would allow. After a minute or so, Gwen asked, ‘What’s worrying you, Billy?’ (The names of all ward patients were at the head of the bed). Tearfully I said, “The doctors have just told me I’d never walk again!” I will never forget her reply.

Such news from the medics was news that my ears didn’t want to hear at that time; news that every part of my being didn’t want to believe. This Welsh orderly, who was a somewhat oversized lady of small stature and jovial characteristics straightened my bed covering calmly as she said, “What do they know about it! Who says what they say is the be all and end all?”

These were words I needed to hear at that precise moment. When western medicine tells you that you will never walk again and you don’t want to believe that message, then you start to believe in something else; a different message that offers hope. I refused to accept the medical prognostication, and over the months and years ahead, this 12-year-old boy started to read everything he could get my hands on about eastern medicine and disciplines in meditation, relaxation, dance and balance.

I eventually started to believe in much of what I read (no doubt because that is what I wanted/chose to believe in). In short; I started to believe in the words that Gwen the hospital orderly, friend, mother-figure and my Florence Nightingale had spoken to me on the morning of that fateful day my life changed for the better. Essentially, the message that I was receiving from Gwen was, ‘You choose what beliefs you want to hold; you and nobody or nothing else determine what you choose to believe, and only God chooses what will be.” This sentiment was also summed up in Shakespeare’s play ‘Hamlet’: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

I know that in many ways, others today will simply hold the view that ‘It is Only Make Belief’ that I was at play with that fateful morning as Gwen uttered her prophetic words. However, nothing will ever persuade me that though others may have thought I was engaged in 'make belief' that I made that morning’s make belief ‘my belief’ over the crucial years ahead. Within three years of my traffic accident, my spine had medically inexplicably re-connected with my brain and I started to regain the use of my legs. I started to walk again at the start of my 15th year of life.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 27th June 2019

27/6/2019

Today’s song is dedicated to my brother, Michael, whose birthday it is today. The song is a ballad written by Bobby Scott and Bob Russell. Originally recorded by Kelly Gorden in 1969, the song became a worldwide hit for ‘The Hollies’ later that year and again for Neil Diamond in 1970. It has been recorded by many artists in subsequent years
Origin of the title came from a religious Parable. In 1884, James Wells, Moderator of the ‘United Free Church of Scotland’, in his book ‘The Parables of Jesus’ tells the story of a little girl carrying a big baby boy. Seeing her struggling, someone asked if she wasn't tired. With surprise, she replied: "No, he's not heavy; he's my brother."
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Today’s song is dedicated to my youngest brother, Michael, who celebrates his 65th birthday today. Michael is the second youngest of seven siblings. Often, the younger siblings tend to be the most pampered in a large family, but in the case of our my brother Michael, his experience of growing up in the Forde household in the shadows of his three older brothers, two older sisters and one sister younger than himself was a different experience than I ever had as the firstborn of seven children.
For a start, by the time Michael was in his teens, my parent’s marriage had lost its initial romantic gloss that seems to last between the honeymoon period and the first five to ten years. I can still recall my parents walking me and my next two sisters across the fields on one of our Sunday afternoon walks to the park in Brighouse (a distance of three miles each way) and telling us to play a while as they lay down and ‘had a little rest’. Indeed, for a while between the ages of 6-9 years, I believed the long grass of nearby fields to be filled with magic, as almost every time our mother and father laid down in the long grass on our family Sunday afternoons out, nine months later, I would have another brother or sister to keep an eye on.
So, my childhood years were spent having parents who were deeply in love with each other; more content in their relationship than they would ever be during the second decade of their marriage when they would become parents to seven children in total.
Brother Michael, on the other hand, was unfortunately raised during leaner years, when money was still scarce, overtime of my hardworking father was necessary to feed and keep an ever-increasing family, and arguments between my parents grew more frequent whenever tiredness of body with working 24/7 started to strain their patience with each other. All lasting relationships operate on the willingness of both parties to leave things unsaid at certain times and let them pass without slight. But when fatigue enters both the mind and body of a hard-working man and wife, such slights are instantly seen, picked up and acted upon instead of ignored.
Neither parent was averse to having a good old shouting match with a few choice swear-words thrown in to liven it up. Even the throwing of an odd plate or other missiles across the room was not beyond them when they got angry enough with each other. They still loved each other, but I got the distinct impression that they didn’t always ‘like each other’. The occasions ‘when they didn’t like each other’ got more frequent towards my mid-teenage years.
At a time in his life when my 5 and 6-year-old brother Michael should have been receiving a surfeit of parental attention, like the amount that was lavished on me (their firstborn), instead, Michael became one just one more member of a noisier house and larger family of seven children, with food enough on the table to feed only four or five adequately.
Family walks had long since stopped and we were left to make our own fun and devise our own activities and travels with each other and other close friends on the estate. As brother Michael entered his First School in Heckmondwike, walks between mum and dad, along with them having a little ‘rest’ in the fields became distant memories of better and more carefree days which he would never experience. Dad would now walk down the fields alone and mum would use whatever few hours of spare time she got going to Bingo in Heckmondwike with an Irish friend of the family.
In their later years, after all the children had left home and married, my parent’s relationship underwent change again. They each grew more courteous and respectful to each other and seemed to be more conversational and caring for the other’s needs. It was as though they had started 'to grow back together' into the martial force of unity they once had been.
It was as though the birth and presence in their early married relationship of me and my sisters Mary and Eileen enabled the loving couple to complete their ‘happily married jigsaw’. Just as the everyday pressures and family size each grew with the birth of another brother or sister, it was as though our mum and dad had less time for the things they once shared as they struggled to provide for their family. It was as though they had witnessed the dismantling and break up of their ‘happily married jigsaw’ which was abandoned under the stairs, at the back of a small cupboard of ‘fond memories of when we were madly in love with each other’. My brother Michael would have lived most of his childhood years through this harsher period in our parent’s marriage.
Then, after all their seven children had left home, my parents, who were now in their sixties, found themselves alone with each other’s company in a pensioner’s flat in Liversedge. Having nobody else to talk to and relate with except each other, their marital relationship changed once more. This would be the final change and it would see my mum and dad grow back together. It was as though they had found their ‘happily married jigsaw’ in its box, hidden at the back of their marital cupboard and together, they started making up the completed picture again. With each piece they picked up and inspected before inserting back into its perfect place, they started to see what it was that had initially made them fall in love with each other. Day by day, as they rebuilt their ‘happily married jigsaw’ they remembered what they once liked about the other; all the good traits and characteristics of each other which initially attracted them both in the same direction. Eventually, the day finally arrived when they remembered what they once had and wanted it back as much as possible.
Once they had rebuilt their ‘happily married jigsaw’, marital peace and contentment with each other was restored and remained unbroken until my parents died.
During their final years living together, our mum and dad began to accept each other once more. They started to like each other, care about each other and love each other again, with that gentleness of understanding and forgiveness that flows more readily in the rivers of old age. The respect that mum and dad always paid each other in their early days of marriage gradually returned, and when mum died at the early age of 64 years, my dad appeared to grieve her absence in his life until he died five years later.
Meanwhile, brother Michael had married and fathered two sons (both fully grown and one married with children of his own). Michael and his wife, Denise, like most married couples, have had their personal struggles and trials to contend with and they now live with their son, Carl, whose tragic accident in a car crash many years ago left him unable to walk or have any feeling below his waistline.
Over the past twenty years, I have witnessed my brother Michael grow into as good a husband, father and individual as there is, and whom I am proud to call ‘brother’. Then, of course, I’d say that, wouldn’t I? ‘cos he’s my little brother’. Happy birthday, Michael from your Big brother Billy and Sheila x
Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 26th June 2019

26/6/2019

Today’s song is ‘The Long and Winding Road’. This song was recorded by the ‘Beatles’ on their 1970 album ‘Let it Be’. It was written by Paul McCartney and credited to John Lennon. When issued as a single in May 1970, a month after the Beatles broke up, it became the group's 20th and last Number 1 hit on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in the United States. It was the final single released by the quartet.

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This song represents for me, the journey through one’s life; the trials and tribulations, the cheers and celebrations, the happiness and sadness, the disappointments and the pleasant surprises, the successes and the failures; all the experiences, thoughts, feelings and emotions one has during life’s travels. None of us is lucky enough to travel a straight road without some bends, twists and curves, some misleading signposts that lead to us losing our way, or without stony and uneven paths that create pain during the travel. Some of us may never reach the destination we originally charted our course and set off on, while others have never been able to establish what trouble they are heading for if they don’t chase course.

If you are wise, once you are on your road to where you want to go and believe yourself to be on the right path, then the secret is to simply ‘keep going’ in the same direction. As for blind bends in the road and dangerous twists and turns, know that they exist on your ‘map of experiences to be expected’ and you will not be stunned by sudden change. Approach each blind corner in confidence and belief that what lies around the corner has a greater chance of being something good instead of bad, something exciting instead of threatening, and something that will please your senses and not offend them! There is approximately 60 per cent chance of your experience ‘around the corner’ being an uneventful and harmless one, thirty-five percent chance of your new experience being a good and pleasurable one, and no more than five per cent chance of it being a bad or hurtful experience.

So, you see that the chances of going through all of life’s experiences would suggest that for the vast majority of us, life will be constantly good to us, as long as we dare live it and not merely encounter it in part uncertainty and trepidation.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 25th June 2019

25/6/2019

Today’s song is dedicated to two of my Facebook friends, Elaine Drake and Elaine Craven. I admire both women for different reasons and treasure their Facebook friendship.

Today is the birthday of Elaine Drake. May your special day be filled with happy memories and much peace, Elaine…and …lots of cake and wine. Elaine and I were brought up in the same area of West Yorkshire and though she may not be aware, I love scanning through her daily posts and I admire her poignancy of thought in her page selection of daily thoughts (the most recent ironic one being how we can honour the ‘Second World War’ heroes one week and remove their free television licences the next)!

Elaine Craven, on the other hand, (whose birthday it isn't) is one of the bravest women I know who has probably had more hard knocks in life than anyone, and still she refuses to allow anything to keep her down. She has just experienced a year of renewed heartache that most people would simply find intolerable. In many ways, her ability to express her anger at the injustice heaped upon her loved ones has kept her sane, but it is the love she possesses inside her and which she expresses towards her friends and loved ones that will prove her lasting salvation, and will hopefully enable her glimpses and experiences of lasting happiness at a future date.

To both women of substance, I dedicate today’s song. You are each much more admired and loved than you can possibly imagine. Never lose that love of life and fight for survival inside you, and never forget a message that has meant so much to me in life and which was responsible for changing my life at a time it needed changing: ‘Love Changes Everything’.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song for Today: 24th June 2019

24/6/2019

Today’s song I dedicate to my beautiful wife and soul mate, Sheila. The song is, ‘You’re the Reason I’m Living’; which essentially says it all in its title.

‘You’re the Reason I’m Living’ is a 1963 single by Bobby Darin from his album of the same name. The single was very successful, spending two weeks at Number 3 on ‘Billboard's Hot 100 Singles Chart’ beginning March 16, 1963. Elvis Presley recorded a live version of the song for 1975's ‘Live in Las Vegas’.

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As I indicated in my opening line today, the song title and this song’s content essentially says everything I could say about the love of my life, my wife, Sheila and identifies my situation since we first met. At a time in life, when we were both ‘down’, that fateful first meeting of ours in the Main Street of Haworth on a cold December day in 2010 told us that ‘love could still be found’.

There is one beautiful couplet in the song that sums up precisely what I feel for Sheila more than any words I could ever pen, ”You’re the reason I do things, you’re the things that I do, you’re the reason I’m living, I’d be lost without you’. I love you, Sheila Forde x

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 23rd June 2019

23/6/2019

Today’s song is ‘Your Cheating Heart’. This song was written and recorded by country music singer-songwriter Hank Williams in 1952 and is regarded as one of country music's most important standards. Country music historian Colin Escott writes that "the song (for all intents and purposes), defines country music." He was inspired to write the song while driving with his fianceé from Nashville, Tennessee to Louisiana. After describing his first wife Audrey Sheppard as a ‘Cheatin' Heart’, he composed the lyrics in a matter of minutes.

‘Your Cheatin' Heart’ was released in January 1953. Propelled by Williams' death during a trip to a New Year's concert in Canton, Ohio, the song became an instant success. The song topped ‘Billboard’s Country & Western Chart’ for six weeks, while over a million units were sold. It reached Number 13 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ and became ‘Billboard’s Most Played in Jukeboxes’ the same year. The song ranked at Number 213 on Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’ and was ranked Number 5 on ‘Country Music Television’s 100 Greatest Songs in Country Music’.

Others who have covered the song include Frankie Laine: Patsy Cline: Ray Charles: Louis Armstrong: Fats Domino and Elvis Presley to name but a few.

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While there have been many bad things I have done in my earlier life, particularly in my wild teenage years, I have always been up-front and decent with every woman I have ever had any form of association with. Even my ex-girlfriends always remained good friends with me after our close association had ended and would be hard pressed to say a bad word about me.

Only once in the whole of my life can I recall treating a young woman with less respect and consideration than she deserved. After my first wife dumped and divorced me, I returned to the dance hall of the Mecca in Bradford which had always been a good spot for single men and women ‘finding each other’ on a dance floor of 'lost souls and broken hearts'.

Admittedly, the discovery of a desirable female companion might only be for one night instead of a lifetime, but until true love was to be found again, one-night stands became a more common expectation and acceptable experience of those re-entering the adult dating scene.

On the night in question, I and my friend Geoffrey Griffiths went to the Mecca. We each drove there in our own car, in the event we both managed to get fixed up at the end of the night with a girl to take home. As luck would have it, I ended up taking an attractive woman in her mid-twenties home. She had obviously wanted to get off with me, as it was she who actually approached me and asked me to dance as Geoffrey and I eyed up the remaining talent on the dance floor.

As I drove home with the woman, we each had different things on our mind. She was going through a difficult patch in her life at the time and obviously saw me as a person with a sympathetic ear in whom she could confide. More than anything else, she needed a degree of sensitivity, understanding and sympathy from the man in the car beside her as she expressed the things that were undoubtedly worrying her. While she wanted to get off with me, my mind was set on certain clothing items of hers I wanted to get off her.

While we were both willing and ‘up for it’ that night, after I'd safely dropped her back home in the early morning hours, I couldn’t help thinking that ‘I’d let both of us down’ by my overall response the situation I was a part of; she in her expectations of me being ‘a good listener’ and ‘sympathetic respondent’, and me in the usual high standards I automatically displayed when dealing with a damsel in distress.

I found it hard to forgive myself for my lack of sensitivity and poorer than normal response, and I went to work the following morning ashamed of my overall behaviour. I had been too preoccupied with what I had wanted and had failed to respond to what she had primarily wanted as well as my company.

From that day on, I can honestly say that my behaviour to any woman I since encountered was more considerate, respectful and truthful in every regard. While there have been times in the past when I moved from one woman to another with the fleetness of foot of a ballroom dancer, I have never two-timed a woman in my life or pretended our relationship to have been any more than clearly stated and understood between us. If ever a heart has cheated, ‘it was never mine’.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 22nd June 2019

22/6/2019

Today’s song is ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. This is a song by Northern Irish singer and songwriter Van Morrison. Written by Morrison and recorded in March 1967, it peaked at Number 10 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’. It featured the ‘Sweet Inspirations’ singing back-up vocals and is regarded as Van Morrison's signature song. ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ has remained a staple on classic rock radio and has been covered by hundreds of bands over the decades.

Originally titled ‘Brown-Skinned Girl’, Morrison changed it to ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ when he recorded it. Morrison remarked on the title change: "That was just a mistake. It was a kind of Jamaican song. Calypso. It just slipped my mind [that] I changed the title……After we'd recorded it, I looked at the tape box and didn't even notice that I'd changed the title. I looked at the box where I'd laid it down with my guitar and it said 'Brown Eyed Girl' on the tape box. It's just one of those things that happen."

The song's nostalgic lyrics about a former love were considered too suggestive at the time to be played on many radio stations. A radio-edit of the song was released which removed the lyrics "making love in the green grass", replacing them with "laughin' and a-runnin', hey hey" from a previous verse. This edited version appears on some copies of the compilation album ‘The Best of Van Morrison’. However, the remastered CD seems to have the cleaner lyrics in the packaging but the original ‘racy’ lyrics on the disc.

Because of a contract he signed with ‘Bang Records’ without legal advice, Morrison states that he has never received any royalties for writing or recording this song. The contract made him liable for virtually all recording expenses incurred for all of his ‘Bang Records’ recordings before royalties would be paid, and after those expenses were recouped, the revenue would become the ‘subject of some highly creative accounting’. Morrison vented frustration about this unjust contract in his sarcastic nonsense song ‘The Big Royalty Check’. Morrison has stated that ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is not among his favourite songs, remarking "it's not one of my best. I mean I've got about 300 songs that I think are better".

Morrison's original recording of ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ remains widely familiar today, as the uncensored version is regularly played by many ‘oldies’ and ‘classic rock’ radio stations. In 2005, Morrison received a Million- In 2011, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ joined an elite group of songs as it was honoured for having 10 million US radio air plays. As of 2015, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ remains the most downloaded and most played song of the entire 1960s decade.

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The first woman who ever appeared beautiful in my eyes was my mother. A photograph of her in her late teens, just before her marriage to my father reveals her to be a dark-haired woman with hazel brown eyes. All my life, ever since my first physical attraction to the opposite sex emerged, only black-haired brown-eyed women have had the power to ‘turn my engine on and engage me at full throttle’.

Every love of my life has conformed to these unconsciously operated preferences in genetic structure. If I think hard on it, there surely must have been several women I met in life whom I could have loved, if ever my inbred bias had allowed me to get past my genetic preferences, allowing them access to my heart instead of my bed. I acknowledge having physically known a few blonde bombshells in my earlier years of ‘romancing the stone’, whilst I was waiting for the right one to come along and save me from myself.

I will also admit to secretly loving redheads, and imagining the fiery tempers on them ever since I saw Maureen O'Hara in the film, 'The Quiet Man'. Only once in my divorced years did I entertain the brief experience of dating a red-haired woman. We went out on a four-month period of only sleeping in my own bed between Monday and Friday. She was certainly a woman who loved life to the full. Unfortunately, near exhaustion led me to break with her. My conclusion would be as follows in the female comparison stakes: “You can sleep with a blonde, you can sleep with a brunette, but you'll never get any sleep with a redhead!”

So, following my mother’s sound advice, I have spent almost all my courting, womanising and marital life sticking with what I know best suits me and tickles my taste buds.

Love and peace Bill xxx

Song For Today: 21st June 2019

21/6/2019

I dedicate my song to my niece, Kathryn whose birthday it is today (known to her Facebook friends as Kat Forde).

Today’s song is ‘Woman’ which was written and performed by John Lennon from his 1980 album ‘Double Fantasy’. The track was chosen by Lennon to be the second single released from the Double Fantasy album, and it was the first Lennon single issued after his murder on 8 December 1980.

Lennon wrote "Woman" as an ode to his wife, Yoko Ono, and to all women. The track begins with Lennon whispering, "For the other half of the sky ...", a paraphrase of a Chinese proverb once used by Mao Zedong.

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I dedicate today’s song to my niece, Kathryn Forde; daughter of my brother Peter and his wife Linda, Kathryn is in many ways a free spirit and wild roamer; someone who is always seeking out new places to travel to and explore. In many ways, Kathryn and my son, William who lives between Bali and Australia, are similar sides of the same coin who were born to different brothers. Both completed their university degrees long ago yet have extended the traditional ‘gap year’ many students of life have into a ‘gap decade’ as they travel to and around different countries. Kathryn has always been a free spirit. It has been lovely to watch her blossom and grow into womanhood over the years.

In many ways, Kathryn was largely responsible for me having visited and held over 2,000 (two thousand) story-telling assemblies in Yorkshire Primary schools between 1989 and 2002. I still recall Kathryn as a five-year-old who was so proud that her Uncle Billy had become an author, that she told her headmaster and he invited me to read from my first published children’s book to a school assembly of his pupils. My niece's school was the very first school I read in. In later years, as I became more well-known and established as a children’s author, I was able to bring the Earl and Countess of Harewood to Kathryn's school to read for them.

After visiting Kathryn’s school, things started to mushroom as I simply carried on being invited into schools to read to assembled children. And over the following 11 years, ( especially after the late Princess Diana and the South African President Nelson Mandela contacted me and praised my books), I was reading in school s all over Yorkshire, along with a stable of 860 famous names and celebrities who came from the realms of royalty, politics, church, film, stage, television, sport, and even space. I could go so far as to add ‘puppetry’ to the list of national and international celebrities who publicly read my books as the famous ‘Sooty’ once read from one of my books in a Batley school.

Life is sometimes funny, crazy; often a whirlwind that takes one to places one never imagined they might go. By the time one stops spinning, that phase of life has passed and a new stage of life has begun. That has been as true for my niece Kathryn every bit as much as it has been for myself. I am so glad, Kathryn, that whatever I have managed to positively achieve in my life since you were a spotty-faced snotty-nosed five-year-old in Primary School, that you proved to be the initial spark that set my world ablaze. I remain indebted to you and extremely proud of the beautiful woman you have turned out to be.

Sheila and I wish you a very happy birthday, Kathryn. May your day be filled with all the love and happiness you deserve. Have a beautiful and exciting life; you deserve it. Love you lots. Uncle Billy x

Love and peace Bill xxx