FordeFables
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    • Strictly for Adults Novels >
      • Rebecca's Revenge
      • Come Back Peter
    • Tales from Portlaw >
      • 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
      • Sean and Sarah >
        • 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
  • Celebrity Contacts
    • Contacts with Celebrities >
      • Journey to the Stars
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      • Shining Stars
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      • There's Nowt Stranger Than Folk
      • Caught Short
      • A Day with Hannah Hauxwell
    • More Contacts with Celebrities >
      • Judgement Day
      • The One That Got Away
      • Two Women of Substance
      • The Outcasts
      • Cars for Stars
      • Going That Extra Mile
      • Lady in Red
      • Television Presenters
  • Thoughts and Musings
    • Bereavement >
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      • Always wear clean shoes
      • 'Family Tree'
      • The importance of poise
      • 'Growing up with grandparents'
    • Love & Romance >
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      • The Greatest
      • Arthur & Guinevere
      • Hands That Touch
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      • Reuben's Naming Ceremony
      • Love makes the World go round
      • Walks along the Mirfield canal
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Song For Today: 31st October 2020

31/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to JJ O Neil who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland.

My song today is ‘Little Red Riding Hood'. This 1966 song performed by ‘Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’. It was the group's second top-10 hit, reaching Number 2 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in August 1966.  Outside the US, it peaked at Number 2 on the Canadian RPM magazine charts. It was certified gold by the RIAA on August 11, 1966. 

The song is built around Charles Perrault's fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, adapted by ending before the grandmother makes her entrance, and explicitly using the ambiguity of modern English between wolf, (the carnivore), and wolf, (a man with concealed sexual intentions). The effect, whether intentional or incidental, is to strip away the fairy tale's metaphorical device and present the relationship between the two characters without literary pretence.

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When this song was first released, I had just returned from Canada, having spent two years there. However, despite being 78 in a few weeks’ time (53 years after the record’s release), until last month, I had never heard of either the song or the group that recorded it.

I remember being first told the story as a child at First School, and I also remember being scared out my wits with it also, something that would never be allowed to take place in a classroom today. In fact, I would not be surprised if it isn’t one of those stories which are on the educational list of banned books in today’s politically correct age.

The fairy story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has been written in many variations over the centuries; each with a different slant and ending from that of the version by Brothers Grimm. To me, the story always held duel overtones in which Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, would have had a field day analysing. Freud would have certainly allied his interpretation of the story to a particular legend that was recounted by Pausanias.

Pausanias was a Greek traveller and geographer of the second century AD. He lived in the time of the Roman emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius and is more remembered for his superb ‘Description of Greece’. The story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ displays many similarities to stories from classical Greece and Rome. Scholar Graham Anderson has compared the story to a local legend that was recounted by Pausanias. In the legend described by Pausanias, a virgin girl is offered up to a malevolent spirit annually. The malevolent spirit is dressed in the skin of a wolf, who then proceeds to violate the girl. Then, one year, the boxer Euthymos comes along and slays the evil spirit and marries the girl who was due to be offered up as a sacrifice.

When I first heard the song I sing today, I was reminded of the legend told by the Greek traveller Pausanias. Have a nice day, and whatever you do, don’t go down to the woods today! 

Love and peace Bill x
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Song For Today: 30th October 2020

30/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my great-niece, Millie Rose Swales who celebrates her 14th birthday today. Millie is the granddaughter of my brother Peter and his wife, Linda, and is the daughter of my niece Sam who moved up to Aberdeen to live last year. Sam recently lost her partner who died of Covid-19. Enjoy your special day, Millie. Great Uncle Billy xxx

I also wish a happy birthday to Maria Sheedy who lives in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Enjoy your special day, Maria x
'My song today is ‘My Way’. This song was popularised in 1969 by Frank Sinatra. The song is set to the music of the French song ‘Comme d’habitude’ which was composed and written by French songwriters Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux. It was performed in 1967 by Claude Francois. Its English lyrics were written by Paul Anka and are unrelated to the original French song. The song was Sinatra's signature tune and his version of ‘My Way’ spent 75 weeks in the UK Top 40; a record which still stands.

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I have done many things in my life, some noble, some suspect, and some wrong! What I can say without a shred of doubt, however, is that I have always been my own man and I have essentially always done my own thing. Some of the things I have done, I have done deliberately, and some things have been done unknowingly or involuntarily. Overall, today’s song resonates with whatever is ‘the real me’. When the end of my life comes around (which I do not plan to be this year), I will be able to say, “I did it my way”.

I go into 'Leeds General Hospital' today to have my seventh operation in the past two years. I am having an aggressive skin cancer removed from my facial cheekbones. This very same cancer has moved to three different places over the past two years; down one side of my skull from my forehead to my neck and throat area, and has now reappeared on my facial cheek. It is perniciously aggressive and is a type of skin cancer that will kill me if not removed, but is also a type that the cancer consultant surgeon informs me is prone to keep returning to a new body area. It looks like it might be one of those companions who is always going to shadow me through my remaining life, so I better make friends with it, and may even consider giving it a name?

One thing that will shadow me after the operation today is the scar across my cheekbone. The area designated for cancer removal is not large enough to give me the distinctive facial features of a ‘bad man’ who people fear messing with but is sufficient to spoil my good looks farther. 

After forty sessions of radiotherapy during the past year and a half, the facial hair down one half of my face will never grow again. My full beard, which I have worn at varying lengths ever since my 21st year of life (57 years ago in two weeks’ time) has gone forever. Had I lived in Victorian times, I could have fitted in as a freak circus attraction called ‘the man with half a beard’.

My last cancer operation was a mammoth one; a neck dissection to remove aggressive cancer from my forehead, around my right ear, all the way down my neck, and across to my Adam’s Apple in the centre of my throat. All the cancer was hopefully removed from this channel, along with all my saliva glands down one side of my face and the soft tissue. It essentially involved a cosmetic facelift, which left me feeling like someone had walloped me across one side of my head with the full force of a cricket bat. As the extensive wound healed, the skin at the operated side of my skull tightened considerably, and seven months later, the sensation on my facial RHS acts as a permanent reminder that I had my throat cut for my own good.

Prior to my neck dissection, my full beard nicely concealed my double chin from the eyes of the nation, which had comfortably hung about for the best part of the past twenty years. My last operation, however, left me with no beard covering, and believe me when I tell you that ‘half of a double chin’ is twice as bad to look at in the morning mirror as a full double chin is! I am currently hoping that I have sufficient stubble on my chin to grow a decent goatee beard to act as a cover, as that will be far less expensive than considering acquiring cosmetic surgery via private means to remove half a double chin!

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the Cancer Consultant Surgeon who will perform today's operation will also remove a little cancer scab which has been lodged on the rim of my left ear for the past year. I have no doubt that this little scab-infested cancer would take up residency in my left ear lobe if not removed today before it has the opportunity to establish squatter's rights! While it is hardly noticeable to the observer, it is like having an irritable fly in one’s ear that creates a constant itch and urge to scratch. Have a nice day, everyone because today is going to be a good day.

Millie and Maria, forgive me for taking part of the spotlight off you two this morning, as today is your day. Today is the celebration of your birth and marks one more landmark of your journey through life. You are 14 years old today, Millie, and very soon you will be entering young womanhood. This is a lovely time in your life to look forward to. It is a time when boys will start looking more attractive than ' snips and snails and puppy dog's tails', while you still remain like 'sugar and spice and all things nice'. You will know that you are gradually growing from a girl into a young woman the day you stop wearing Bobby socks and start wearing nylons. On that day you become old enough to give your heart away.

As for Maria, well she has been a woman for a while now, and I am sure she will remember her days of wearing Bobby socks also, and the girlish fun she had of jumping in puddles for the sheer fun of it!

I do hope that you both enjoy your special day and do not eat too much cake.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Another Song: 30th October 2020

30/10/2020

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OPERATION UPDATE/OUTCOME OF OCTOBER 30th

I had my operation at Leeds General Hospital today and managed to get back home by 6:00 pm. Sheila spent the day hanging around in Leeds. She attended Mass at Leeds Cathedral, went for a long walk and a think, and spent the rest of her five hours waiting around reading in the car.

My operation was under a local and lasted just over one hour. I cannot say it was painless and it 'probably' turned out to be a precursor to a more major operation in the near future. The Cancer Consultant Surgeon, Jenny Goodenough, did me the courtesy of being very frank about her gut feeling and provisional appraisal, (that I asked her for) before she gets any biopsy results back in a few weeks time.

The hard lump of cancer she cut out today was intertwined within the soft tissue beneath my skin, very close to a number of nerves that controls my facial muscles and eyelid movements. My operation today has weakened my eyelid that was above the hard cancer lump the surgeon removed, but if cancer has spread farther across my cheek, it can only be removed by cutting everything beneath my skin (cancer, soft tissue, and facial muscle nerves) all the way down one cheek. The result of this will be all loss of muscle control on one side of my mouth and the operation will afterward leave me looking like a stroke victim facially, but unfortunately, unlike a stroke victim who regains some/all facial muscle use, I won't. 

The Consultant Surgeon has promised to keep me on her emergency list of patients and will phone me the very day she receives the biopsy results back.

While today's operation achieved what it was supposed to do, it suggested the urgent need that further action will 'probably' be required as opposed to 'possibly'. It would be nice to think differently, but such would be unrealistic, given the CLL terminal blood cancer I have had for almost 8 years now (with its side effects of producing other body cancers). My initial emotion is one of disappointment and neither sorrow nor anger, and I ask that any feelings engendered in you by tonight's news from me remain ones of 'disappointment' and not sadness.

When I was initially diagnosed with terminal blood cancer almost 8 years ago, my life expectancy was just over three years. I am confident that I will exceed three times that prognosis, and believe me when I tell you that is nothing to be sad about. If there is any sadness I feel, it is for my wife, Sheila, who lovingly looked after her mother Elizabeth for a decade before looking after me shortly after we got married in November 2012. Sheila has been the best thing that ever came into my life. She is my rock. 

As for my own state of happiness, I have never been happier in my life since I met Sheila, despite the inconvenience of incurring a number of cancers. I cannot remember the last time that I felt unhappy with my life during the past ten years, and I welcome every new dawn I awake and am able to kiss my wife and bid her 'good morning'. Thank you all for your continued thoughts, well wishes, prayers, lit candles, and masses said on mine and Sheila's behalf. The song below is for my lovely wife and soulmate, Sheila.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 29th October 2020

29/10/2020

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 I dedicate my song to five Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. We wish happy birthday to (1) Evelyn Hanlon who lives in County Tipperary, Ireland. (2) Eva Flavin who comes from my birthplace of Portlaw and lives in Waterford, Ireland. (3) Wendy Dunlop who lives in Northampton, Northampton shire, England. (4) Robin Wegman who lives in Waterville, Ohio, USA. (5) Denise Gibson who lives in Oxenhope, West Yorkshire. Enjoy your special Day Evelyn, Eva, Wendy, Robin, and Denise, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.
 
My song today is ‘Neon Moon’. This song was written by Ronnie Dunn and recorded by American country music duo ‘Brooks & Dunn’. It was released in February 1992 as the third single from their debut album ‘Brand New Man’. The song became their third consecutive Number 1 single on the country charts. It was also their first single not to have an accompanying music video.
 
The song's narrator is a man who is at a bar, feeling broken-hearted because his significant other has left, so he spends "most every night beneath the light of a neon moon."
 
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This song was released when I was forty-nine years old. Two years earlier, I had been asked by my employers ‘The West Yorkshire Probation Service’ to write a short book that dealt with ten themes that adversely affected the lives of young school children. The Probation Service agreed to fund the publication of this book which could be read in children’s schools and sold within the area of Kirklees. All the money raised would be donated to the November 1989 ‘Children in Need’ national fundraising event.
 
The initial motive behind the Probation Service’s willingness to fund such a project was to maximise its positive image within the West Yorkshire wider community, very much as local police constabularies had attempted to do across the country. It was not unusual in 1989 to have the local bobby go into schools and give ‘stranger danger’ talks or talks about the effects of crime upon a victim’s family. The police even visited primary schools to run safety cycle courses for owners of their first bicycle. An overall aim of the police at the time was to make the patrolling Bobby on the beat, a figure that young children could grow up to trust and respect.
 
As a person who had practiced all manner of Relaxation Training methods since I had incurred a serious traffic accident at the age of 11 years, I had instructed relaxation training in many segments of the community since the early 1970s. As a consequence of my expertise and credentials in the area of Relaxation methods, junior schools would invite me into their morning assemblies to tell the children how they could relax, and what to do should do to reduce anxious moments in their lives. My brief was to give the young children advice they could understand and teach them simple methods they could easily apply. I chose to provide this input wrapped within a children’s story I had constructed called ‘The Magic Garden’ (which incidentally was my first children’s story that I ever wrote). These school visits became so popular that school requests for me to attend other morning school assemblies quickly mushroomed. I could have literally devoted every minute of my day, every day, to this task alone.
 
At the time, my Relaxation Training programmes had attracted mass media attention in the regional and local press along with other media like regional radio and Yorkshire television stations. Rarely one week passed by when I did not appear in the local and regional newspapers across West and South Yorkshire at least three times or was not interviewed on a Yorkshire radio station or regional television channel. Ever since I joined the Probation Service in 1970/71, I had run my Relaxation Training programmes in Probation Offices across West Yorkshire, Hostels: Hospital Training Courses for Nurses, Doctors, and Psychiatric Staff: Mental Establishments for Psychiatric Patients: Old Folks Homes: Educational Establishments for Training Firemen, Police Constables, Probation Officers, Welfare and Clinical Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Prison Officers: Male Prisoners serving life sentences: Women Prisoners in general: Schools and Colleges for Teachers, Lecturers and Pupils: Churches for Congregation Members: Community Groups: and Charitable Associations. My work was attracting attention across social work bodies in Europe since I founded ‘Anger Management’ in 1972/73, and particularly after I had founded the process of ‘Anger Management’, a method which started to mushroom across the English-speaking world, and was even being cited in the research of some European Social Work manuals.
 
I had my first children’s storybook published by the start of November 1989. It was called ‘Everyone and Everything’ and contained ten stories for the reading age range 5-11 years that dealt with emotions and situations which children find hard to healthily cope with and emotionally resolve. The themes included Bereavement, Separation, Loss, Homelessness, Bullying, Environmental Protection, and Preservation, Racism, Sexism, Discrimination, plus one Relaxation Story. Instead of having a ‘Children in Need’ Fundraising day’, I decided to have a ‘Children in Need Fundraising Month’. To maximise book sales and publicity of my book, I arranged to have regional and national celebrities and famous names visit Kirklees Schools each morning and afternoon (Monday-Fridays) during November, and every November Saturday morning in a Kirklees Library to read from the book. I invited the most famous Yorkshire people that the public could instantly recognise from every walk of life and their television screens, plus a good many national names to read from my book in Kirklees’ First Schools.
 
Every celebrity I invited to visit a Kirklees school or library accepted my invitation. On the day of their visit, they would read a story from my ‘Everyone and Everything’ book to an assembly of Kirklees children and a packed audience of the children’s parents in the background. Given the quality of famous names who became celebrity readers, each school or library assembly throughout the entire month of November attracted half a dozen newspaper photographers and reporters, and there was always at least one radio interviewer, and on half a dozen occasions throughout the month, the television cameras would also be there. Even when the television crew wasn’t there, the event, book, and celebrity reader of it would be mentioned daily on the ‘Yorkshire Television’ and ‘Look North’ channel news bulletins. I naturally arranged things in such a way that maximised the publicity that the reading assemblies attracted. For example, on one reading day during the month of November 1989, the Archbishop of London (who would later become the Archbishop of York) read from the book in a school assembly, and afterward, he planted a tree of remembrance within the school grounds. During the afternoon of the same day, the late Geoffrey Smith (professional gardener, broadcaster, writer and the television presenter of Gardeners World between 1980 to 1982 and a number of other BBC series in the early 80s) would perform his school assembly reading before Christening a large wooden dragon that a local famous artist had constructed in the school playground for the children to secretly tell their troubles to and play merrily around.
 
The most minor celebrity on my list of famous names who read that month was the Kirklees Lord Mayor and the most famous included three national film stars: a female Astronaut in the space programme: the first Arctic Explorer in the world to walk to both the North and the South Poles: two Cabinet Ministers of the government: the Captains of the English Rugby Team and the English Football Team: the Arch Bishop of London, and three Yorkshire Bishops: the Chief Rabbi of England at the time: the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire: the Chief Fire Officer of West Yorkshire: National Authors, Painters, Television Weather Forecasters, Yorkshire Television Presenters: National Opera Singer: one famous Judge of the Crown Courts: two Lords of the Realm, one Baroness and three Lady Peers, and two Knights; one international Classical Pianist etc.etc.  Such celebrity names attracted me more free regional publicity in Yorkshire than any amount of money could ever have bought me. My first published book, ‘Everyone and Everything’ raised over £10,000 in the month of November alone from book sale profits to local schools. The books sold out quicker than we could arrange to have them printed and we could have sold three times as many, had we had available stock to hand that November month. The overall exercise, however, made me a regional household name. Over the following year, there was never a week when I wasn’t paid to give a talk to one organization or another and there was rarely one weekend when I was not asked to open some library or community gala or fete. I always gave any fees paid to me to charitable sources and never kept a penny for myself.
 
By the end of the ‘Children in Need’ month, I was invited to write more children’s books by several regional and national charitable organisations who wanted me to raise money for their particular worthy cause as well as raising awareness of the good work they did. As the demand for me to write books increased, I decided that I wanted to write for charitable causes permanently, and never for personal profit. I also wanted to write about themes and subjects that I wanted to write about; themes that would not be determined by some book editor. I decided to have my own future stories and published books edited by an independent source who I selected. I also wanted to control my own work from the start of the process to the finish, in order to choose my own print type and size preference and select my own artists to illustrate the books I would write. After I had determined my range of preferences, I decided to write my own books, arrange for their printing and publication, and the artwork needed for my coloured illustrated covers and inner illustrations where required. I spent the next year establishing a stable of budding artists to illustrate my books for free and finding two printing companies who would print my limited editions of a few thousand copies of each book I wrote at cost (nil profit). I then I began sourcing vital contacts who would help me raise monies and organise community activities to fund the production and publication of my books. I had literally dozens of people helping me to begin with, which over one decade would become hundreds. I also invited hundreds of national and international celebrities and famous names to read in Yorkshire school assemblies from whichever charitable book I had written and was current when they attended school assemblies across all West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire Schools, plus a number of North Yorkshire schools. Many of these famous names became good friends and would read for me on half a dozen occasions if necessary. Even the Queen of England's household did their bit by helping me with my charitable books. The Queen's cousin, the Earl of Hareward and his wife the Countess, read in three  different Yorkshire schools for me over the decade, and Princess Royal, Anne also read in a Dewsbury Disabled Centre for me, and Princess Margaret spoke with me on the phone once and arranged to help me with a riding school for disabled children in Liversedge, and Princess Diana increased my profile significantly by requesting that I send her two of my books so she might read them to her two young children, Prince William and Prince Harry at their bedtime. Even the Queen pinned a medal on me in 1995 for my contribution to the West Yorkshire Community at Buckingham Palace in 1995.
 
Over a ten-year period, I wrote over forty books, and raised over two hundred thousand pounds for charitable bodies through the profits of book sales, while still working full time as a Probation Officer, and operating my numerous community Relaxation Training programmes. All my books (after my first book) were sold exclusively to Yorkshire schools, and after my fifth book had been published, I had one hundred schools in Yorkshire who were prepared to pre-order fifty copies of my next book before I had even started writing it, and one year before it was published. I had approximately four books a year published over ten years. Each book had themes that I considered more helpful for the healthy emotional development of young children.
 
I knew in advance that I could sell 5,000 copies of any book that I had published, on pre-orders from 100 schools alone in Yorkshire, by providing the school children with stories that their teachers and parents approved of, and which contained the kind of themes I wrote about. The production quality and cost of all my books stood favourably alongside any other author’s book on the school library shelf or which could be found in any book shop. I was not concerned with selling as many copies of each book as I could, as I was writing them faster than I could get the printers to run them off and bind. While I wanted to raise money for worthy charitable causes through donating all the profits from book sales to those charities, I was also wanting to raise awareness on so many subjects which I felt could be of significant help to all children in Yorkshire from 5-13 years. Consequently, I also wanted to include as many useful themes in my stories as I could, and the three and four books which I would write one year would always be published the following year.
 
In a ten-year period between 1990-2000, over eight hundred national and international famous names read from my books in Yorkshire schools. I was writing limited-edition books which the general public could not buy, and as my books became more exclusive to purchase, schools wanted their ration of them even more. There came a time when all school orders could not be met unless the schools concerned had pre-ordered their copies one year in advance or I agreed to have more than between 2000 and 5000 copies printed.  I refused to do this as the books needed to be physically delivered to each school of purchase, a daily task that I personally undertook, or got a volunteer worker to do. Local radio presenters who regularly interviewed me began describing me as 'the author whose books cannot be bought by the general public!'
 
After I retired prematurely from the Probation Service on health grounds in 1995, I wrote copiously and still allowed all my book profits to be diverted toward charitable causes in perpetuity. I have now had over sixty books published, and after 2006 when I put up my pen, it was my wife Sheila, who persuaded me to write again after we married in 2012. Since then I have had fourteen romantic novels and two ‘strictly for adults only’ books published. I have since stopped writing books and spend much of my leisure time when I am not reading the books of other authors practising my singing. I sing these days to improve my lung capacity and increase the oxygenation level in my blood count (which is a bi-product of terminal blood cancer I have had since early 2013).
 
All my writing these days is done on my website and my Facebook daily post. I have made all my published romantic novels freely available to read and download, along with two musical plays and over one dozen professionally recorded audiotapes of children’s stories that were produced for radio transmission many years ago, plus a relaxation tape that I made in a studio forty years ago and which has helped over 10,000 people to relax. I was offered £10,000 to sell the Relaxation tape to a recording company in 1982 but declined. The tape has never been sold since it was first produced and has always been freely given to anyone who could benefit from hearing it.
 
Not being able to write upon the theme of a neon moon today, I have written instead of what I was doing between the dates when the song was released and when I first heard it.
 
Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 28th October 2020

28/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Kathleen Driscoll who lives in the English seaside resort in Teignbridge on the south coast of Devon. I also dedicate my song to Jo-Ann Gill who comes from Carrick-on-Suir in Tipperary Ireland but who now lives in Walkden in Salford, Greater Manchester, England. Both Kathleen and Jo-Ann celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your special day, Kathleen and Jo-Ann, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘My Little Girl’. This song was co-written and performed by American country music singer, Tim McGraw. It reached the top three on the Billboard ‘Hot Country Songs’ chart when it was released in August 2006 as the second single from his compilation album ‘Tim McGraw Reflected: Greatest Hits Vol. 2’. The song was also featured in the 2006 movie, ‘Flicka’ and it was nominated for ‘Best Song’ in 2006 by the ‘Broadcast Film Critics’ Association’. McGraw co-wrote the song with Tom Douglas, making it the first single of McGraw's career that he had a hand in writing.

The narrator of the song addresses his daughter, telling her that even though she is growing up, she will always be ‘his little girl’.

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All parents love their children in different ways and no more is this difference apparent than in a mother-son and a daughter-father relationship, especially where the son is the mother’s firstborn and the girl is the father’s only daughter. In such relationships, the bond between parent and child becomes as strong a bond that is possible to exist, and that is why the relationship can bring both intense pleasure and pain to the different parties. I was my mother’s firstborn and as a father, although I had four sons, I only had one daughter, so I have experienced both relationship sides.

There are few women who do not dream of being a mother. A child is always a blessing for a woman. Life always changes with the appearance of a desirable child, especially if it is a son! To hear the doctor or mid-wife pronounce ‘It`s a boy!’ can become the greatest present. A mother’s love for her son is something transcendent for other people. Only those women, who have a son, can understand how important a man can be in their lives.

As a rule, mothers play an important role in the life of their sons. Sometimes they are even more important than fathers! Some say that fathers are closer to their sons, especially in their teenage years. Maybe that is true, but a mother is the only person who remains important to her son in all his years. She is the one who can understand all his problems because her bond with him started the first moment he began to grow inside her! While fathers are male models for their sons, mothers often act as the blueprint of a model wife in later years. A mother is the parent who is most likely to know if her son is lying. She is his confidante, his apologist, his emotional comforter, and his patroness. He is her hope and protection in her later years, her courageous support, and her future! It is little wonder that husbands are relegated to ‘second place’ in the attention and affections of a wife when their firstborn to their marriage is a son.

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The relationship between a father and an only daughter is first founded on the love he feels for his wife; especially for having produced a beautiful infant replica of herself. With his wife being the woman he has loved most in his life, after his mother, it is only natural for a doting father to cherish and treasure the most perfect clone he could ever have of both former female loves in his life. 

However, the presence of a daughter in the household rarely signals a good omen for a home of peace and contentment between two parents. I do not know what it is, but girls, apart from automatically becoming the ‘apple of their father’s eye’ can so easily upset the applecart in the parental household. Somewhere in their genetic makeup, they possess a gene that no male child was ever endowed with. It is as though they were born with the power to create the widest of divisions between a husband and wife by simply appealing to their individual differences in parental expectations. This effective strategy of the daughter to play one parent off against the other enables her to sow seeds of dissent between any loving husband and wife who may hold different individual views about being a responsible parent. As their daughter spreads dissension between mum and dad, most parents fail to recognise the dirty tricks at play. All gullible parents (which unfortunately include most parents) do not observe the divisive seeds being skilfully scattered by their scheming offspring beneath their very noses. By playing to the strong views of the one parent who is most likely to give way to her, this effectively produces a large crack in the pact of parental partnership, as mum and dad protest that they are the adult in the marital relationship who knows best what is good or bad for their child. 

In the parental ‘War of the Roses’ that follow between mum and dad as to who is the better-placed parent who should set the boundaries for their daughter, the similarities between the war of the past and a war of the present hold striking parallels of learning which I will explain in my conclusion to today’s post.
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Let us say that the married couple and parents of the girl child live in Bosworth Fields (a modern crescent in a middle-class neighbourhood). Their daughter is called Elizabeth and one day she will grow up into a fine woman and will marry a man called Henry. But until she matures into a sensible woman and that happy day arrives, she will remain a constant thorn in her mother’s side; someone, who as ‘daddy’s little girl’, will continue to sow division in the once blissful marital relationship that existed with her husband before their daughter was born.

Elizabeth, like all daughters, soon learns the many benefits of becoming ‘a daddy’s girl’, especially when her mother is advising something which goes against her daughter’s wishes and shows no sign of changing her mind however much her daughter protests. ‘Daddy’s girl’ soon learns that turning on the waterworks cuts no ice with her mother, whereas she can persuade her doting dad (and in her adult years, all other males in her life)  around to her way of thinking and desire. Within Elizabeth’s armoury, there is no need for any heavy weaponry that force a compliant response. No! Just being a ‘daddy’s girl’ can make her father do whatever she wants him to do. While being armed with no more than a ‘Shirley Temple butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth hang-dog smile’ and a charm offensive that would extract a £5note from the hardest-hearted most-miserly Scrooge alive, Elizabeth gets her way again. Elizabeth, though still a child, is in the process of learning what all adult females know; how to make males hold doors open for them with nothing more than the coyest of smiles. 

By the time Elizabeth starts First School, she has acquired three shelves crammed with dolls, and a playroom filled with colouring books and other toys which she persuaded daddy to buy her, despite her mother’s protests to the contrary, citing that she was being overindulged by her father and would end up a spoiled as a consequence. Indeed, the number of Elizabeth’s toys, dolls and pleasure acquisitions are only exceeded by the wardrobe of fashionable clothes she never manages to grow out before dad comes home from work with another new dress or outfit for his ‘little girl’. Such is Elizabeth’s acquisitions that she has collected from battlefields of parental wars. Elizabeth is now able to persuade her father to buy her anything her heart desires. Simply by the use of a childish pout, a sugary smile,  a heartfelt plea, or by turning on the waterworks and crying bucket loads of crocodile tears on demand, she is able to soften any stiff resolve of a hesitant father.
While the father/daughter relationship can be so beautiful and rewarding, it is nevertheless fraught with a Freudian nightmare that is sadly inescapable. Such a change in circumstances always comes along when his daughter is no longer his ‘little girl’ and starts to adopt the mantle of young womanhood. When a father’s daughter takes off her Bobby Socks and replaces them with nylon stockings, it is at this moment when her father is obliged to realise that she is no longer his ‘little girl’. When it dawns on him that she is now old enough to give her heart away, he is overcome with what can only be described as a ‘Freudian jealousy’ about what else she might give away! Dad becomes fearful that another man, or perhaps a string of men is waiting in line like a row of sniffer dogs who have been attracted by a scent which they cannot any longer ignore. 

It is at this stage of Elizabeth’s life that her father fears he is being supplanted in his daughter’s affections by a scruffy band of long-haired suitors who are only out for one thing if they can get it’. He knows from his own teenage years, that if the young men in Elizabeth’s life are ever allowed to get passed her father’s guard and persuade his daughter to lower her only remaining protection, that the game is over! How does dad know what his daughter’s group of male suitors want, I hear you ask? Easy; he simply casts his mind back to his earlier teenage years; to the time when he started courting his sixteen-year-old girlfriend (who later became his wife and Elizabeth’s mother) and starts to remember things that he would now sooner forget! Realising the imminent danger of romantic entrapment that his daughter faces, he becomes ever more determined that none of them will ever walk off with the ultimate prize before he has walked his ‘little girl’ down the aisle on her wedding day in the whitest of wedding dresses. This new awareness of the dangers ahead over the next few years between his daughter and the opposite sex leads him to gradually change his relationship with her.

No more can her charming smiles or crocodile tears move him from his role as her ‘Knight in shining armour’ who is sworn to protect Elizabeth’s honour. He starts to build a moat of defence around his fortress of protection which was once called home. Even Elizabeth’s genuine tears are no longer capable of making her father weaken his resolve. Once he has made up his mind on a certain course of action, he does not change it. Gradually, dad lays down his new expectations of his daughter’s behaviour.  Under the new house rules laid down by her father, Elizabeth can only go out with boys who will call to collect her at her home and safely bring her back there at the appointed hour, and not a minute later! This allows dad to judge the type of opposition he is up against as he is presented with an opportunity to size up his daughter’s current follower. Dad increasingly finds himself becoming more of a fashion critic and starts to dictate what kind of dresses and clothes is fitting for a young woman like Elizabeth to wear. He starts to suspect that he is fighting a losing battle as he realises that there is absolutely no point in him warning off his daughter’s boyfriends as regarding what not to do and where not to go if his daughter insists on wearing skimpy clothes and skirts so short that they merely invite her boyfriends to taste the forbidden fruit in sight!

It is at this stage of Elizabeth’s life, that having realised her dad means to have his way whatever she says or does that she switches parental alliances and draws closer to mum once more. She starts talking to her mother more and more about all manner of things, and essentially, she begins relating to her mother like she would a big sister she can comfortably confide in. Mum becomes so enamoured by this new adult relationship with her grown-up daughter, and before Elizabeth’s father realises the process of change that has taken place in household dynamics, his wife starts to increasingly take their daughter’s side in father/daughter disputes.

I am not saying that such a relationship does not come to really exist between all daughters and their mothers in their mid-teenage years as they enter the window of womanhood. I am merely pointing out the strategic advantage which has come about by Elizabeth now enjoying a mother/daughter relationship which can morph into a sister/sister relationship whenever she desires it, especially whenever it is in the daughter’s individual interest to confide in her mother!  

So, all fathers of daughters, beware of what is to come farther down the line as your ‘little girl’ grows older and matures into young womanhood. Remember the year when the relationship between daddy and his ‘little girl’ started to change. When you notice your Elizabeth discarding her Bobby Socks and donning nylon stockings, you may as well hand the reins of parental responsibility back to your daughter’s mother. You may be able to walk your daughter, Elizabeth, down the church aisle on the day of her marriage in the whitest of wedding dresses, but in your heart of hearts, you will not have the right to know if she was worthy of wearing such a white gown of maidenhood. The last official rights you will have in your daughter, Elizabeth’s life is to pay for the expensive white wedding dress: and four matching bridesmaid’s dresses and a miniature suit of top hat and tails for the two young page boys: and all the flowers and wedding bouquets: and four dozen hotel guest rooms for the bride and grooms’ immediate family on the eve of the wedding: and the wedding breakfast on the big day for close family members: and a sit-down meal reception for 200 wedding guests: and a marquee in the hotel grounds for the drinkers who still like to smoke: and an open bar tab for the first half-hour of the wedding reception: and 50 bottles of the best champagne to toast the bride and groom: and not forgetting payment for all the wedding cars hired, along with the honeymoon present from the bride’s parents (which invariably means the bride’s dad) of two weeks honeymoon in sunny Barbados! When poor dad gets the courage to open his next bank statement to check the total cost of his ‘little girl’s wedding’, and has a double-take as he stares at his bank balance ‘marked in red ink’ (courtesy of the friendly bank manager), he secretly tells himself that it is he and his wife who deserves two weeks in sunny Barbados!

Paradoxically, the real ‘War of the Roses’ which represented a series of civil wars for control of the throne of England is symbolically representative to the lengthy marital dispute that most mums and dads engage in as they battle for the control of their daughter, Elizabeth’s, behaviour. Whereas the two warring factions in England fought between 1455-1487 before one side eventually triumphed over the other, the mother/father parental battle may not actually be as lengthy as 32 years before it concludes, but to the warring parents, it will seem like 32 years! 

Neither do the symbolic parallels stop there? Similarities continue to be shown as both situations conclude in identical fashion. In the ‘War of the Roses’ Henry Tudor (later Henry V11) defeated and killed Richard 111 at Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485, bringing the English civil ‘Wars of the Roses’ to a close. But it was only by his marriage to Edward IV's daughter, ‘Elizabeth’ of York in 1486, that ‘Henry’ united the Yorkist and Lancastrian houses in peace once more.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 27 October 2020

27/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to four people who celebrate their birthday today. (1) We wish a happy birthday to my friend Ralph May who lives in Wyke, in West Yorkshire. (2) We wish a happy birthday to June Foley who comes from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary but currently lives in London. (3) We wish a happy birthday to Lizzy Walsh from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary. (4) We wish a happy birthday to Greg Manahan who lives in Platte City, Missouri, USA. Ralph, June, Lizzy and Greg, enjoy your special day.
My song today is “Nice ‘n’ Easy”. This song was a 1960 album by Frank Sinatra and spent nine weeks at Number 1 on the Billboard ‘Stereo Album Chart’, and one week at Number 1 on the corresponding mono album chart.] At the 1960 Grammy Awards, “Nice ‘n’ Easy” was nominated for the  ‘Album of the Year, ‘Best Vocal Performance’ and ‘Best Arrangement’. The song "Nice 'n' Easy" was released as a single in 1960 and made it to Number 60 on the charts. It was also recorded by Charlie Rich in 1964, Peggy Lee in 1966, Alex Chilton in 1989, Michael Buble in 2004, Natalie Cole in 2008, and Barbra Streisand in 2011. In 2000 it was voted Number 545 in Colin Larkin’s ‘All-Time Top 1000 Albums’. 

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I first heard this song when I was in my late teens. Because of a very bad traffic accident which prevented me from walking for three years between my 11th and 14th birthday, very few things were ‘nice and easy’ for me until my 18th year of life began to show substantial improvement.  All of my leisure time outside my employment was devoted to doing all manner of exercises to regain my walking mobility. I had over fifty operations on my legs after my body had been wrapped around the main drive shaft of the wagon which knocked me down and ran over me. I spent the years between 14 and 18 attempting to turn my ungainly hobble into a more acceptable walk. This was extremely difficult as all the operations had left one of my legs three inches shorter than the other one, and the extent of leg-length differential left me with a pronounced limp. I was determined never to wear built-up shoes or footwear with metal braces to compensate for the weakness of my leg strength, despite medical advice to the contrary. I firmly held the view that if I was to ever reach a degree of maximum mobility, walking agility, and near normality, then I would need to find some other way to make my upper body compensate for my lower body by adjusting to whatever physical difficulties I faced.

The bottom line is that over a 4-year period, I learned to minimise the natural extent of my three-inch limp through a combination of mental imagery, progressive relaxation exercises, and engaging in every sport or activity that would improve my balance. The sporting exercises I did included, judo, boxing, amateur wrestling, horse riding, Indian dance, lawn tennis, table tennis, dancing, tight rope walking, and running. To minimise my limp, instead of dropping one side of my body down three inches more than the other side, each time I put my short leg forward to walk, I learned to ‘roll the motion’ by making each two steps I took one movement only instead of the more natural two movements. The effect of this ploy to the onlooker watching me walk was to visually disguise the extent in my leg measurement differentials. Yes, I still limped, but not as much as I otherwise would have. Over time (a matter of five years), because I had never worn different height footwear on each foot, my hips readjusted from a pre-accident horizontal level to each other to a post-accident diagonal level. This new posture of my hips assisted the ‘rolling’ motion of my stride each time I walked. Because I never used metal-rod reinforcement braces at each side of my short leg on my footwear, my legs had also grown stronger than they otherwise would have been. Last but not least in minimising my limp, when I walked, the image I held in my mind was that I walked with only a very slight limp. I was, in short, using the powers of auto-suggestion(self-hypnosis) to normalise the look of my walk. One of the counter effects of the methods I employed was that whenever my body became wearier (at the end of a hard day at work), my mental concentration was never as effective and I limped to a much greater extent than when I was refreshed and more mentally alert. 

When I was first taken into hospital at the age of 11 years with multiple life-threatening injuries, my spine had been damaged with the torso of my body having been twisted around the wagon propeller drive shaft, and I had lost all feeling below my waistline. I also had a lung puncture, and my chest had caved in after the breakage of 22 out of my 24 ribs. Both legs, both arms, and collar bone were broken in at least two places per limb. My parents were first told that I would die, and for six weeks I remained at death’s door. When I came off the danger list, I was then told that I would never walk again. I could not possibly envisage a life from the deck of a wheelchair in my adult life, and I did whatever I could from that moment on that was to my advantage. When western medicine offered me no hope, I turned my young mind to eastern culture and traditions. During my nine months as an inpatient at ‘Batley General Hospital’, I read as many books as I could on subjects which would be difficult for most adults to understand, let alone a young boy who was not yet twelve years of age. These were books on the subjects of transcendental meditation, progressive relaxation, body balance, martial arts, pain control, and the power of mental imagery and mental instruction (self-hypnosis). 

My teacher, Paddy McNamara, who visited me twice weekly in the hospital obtained the reading material this 12-year-old boy asked him to from library sources, and what the library shelves did not contain, he sourced elsewhere.  I needed to understand the functioning of the human body, especially in areas connected to leg movement and spinal damage, and the communication channels which existed between the two. After reading about the physiological electro-chemical connection between my brain and body, I learned that a connection in my spine had been damaged, and that was why I did not have any feeling in my legs. For six months, by using progressive relaxation and mental image exercises, I imagined feeling pain in my legs reappearing. I would do these mental exercises three and four hours every day and a couple of hours during the night when I could not sleep. I also did a lot of praying. For whatever reason, my spine and my legs started transmitted pain signals to my brain again. The connection in my spinal cord was obviously what medics term today as being an ‘incomplete spinal damage’ and not a ‘complete spinal injury’ which is the permanent loss of function below the area of injury. 

Feeling pain again below my waistline told me that my legs still had life in them, and suggested that the initial area of damage in my spine had corrected itself! This awareness gave me the hope that I might one day walk again.

From my accident, and for every day of my life thereafter, I have practised transcendental meditation and progressive relaxation exercises, along with positive self-talk, breathing pattern exercises, body balance, muscle contraction and tension release exercises, and pain control. I have always had a high pain threshold since my discharge from Batley Hospital at the age of 12 years. Ever since that day I became an avid reader of eastern meditation, and over the years ahead, I would become one of the country’s most authoritative sources in the discipline of Relaxation Training, which I have practised since the age of 12 years and which I have instructed for over 40 years. This early learning and application of these methods and disciplines (along with all the experience to come from my accident) led me to found the process of ‘Anger Management’ during the 1970s; a method that mushroomed across the English-speaking world within the following two years and which workers have used to benefit countless clients who display anger control problems. I have always kept abreast of any new findings of the electrochemical connections between the brain and body since I first became a Probation Officer and ongoing findings of the power of the mind and mental imagery and positive self-talk. 

While a hospital patient at the age of 12 years, my teacher Mr. McNamara arranged to have me tested by Mensa, particularly after he witnessed the nature of reading material that I was asking him to source for me. I had always been either the first or second in my class, whatever the subject, so he knew I was bright. The Mensa test gave me a very high rating, but please be aware that such tests are not accurate measurements of ones in intelligence; they are more a reflection upon the pattern of one’s thinking. When I look back over my life, I was unable to speak properly before I was 4 years old, and as long as I can remember I have always thought in pictures and have been a vivid dreamer. In my later life, Art and paintings have been an immense pleasure of mine.

At the age of thirty, I became a Probation Officer and soon decided that any skills I learned during my Probation Officer training course did not equip me to deal with the range of problems I faced in my client list. I, therefore, abandoned the traditional Probation Officer Rogerian and Freudian methods, and I started to construct my own programme of work which I applied to every client I ever worked with thereafter. The beauty of the Probation Service in 1970 when I was starting out as an Officer was that one was given a caseload of clients to supervise, but nobody told you how to work with each client. So long as you helped them to reduce their criminal behaviour or stop them offending completely, you were considered to be performing your job role satisfactorily. 

I therefore reverted to the methods which had helped me after my accident as an 11-year-old boy, and before my first year as a Probation Officer had gone by, I was dealing with the majority of my clients by group programmes, constructed along the lines which I chose to operate. At the heart of all my group programmes were progressive relaxation, assertive and social skills learning, positive thinking, positive self-talk, breathing pattern exercises, muscle control exercises, fear reduction methods, body posture, autosuggestion, and imagination exercises. There was no prime focus upon criminal offending, but instead, the overall aim was to regain control of one’s behavior and response pattern, establish appropriate fear and anger levels, reduce stress and high blood pressure levels, and improve self-image, confidence levels, and social and communication skills.

All groups I ran were of mixed-sex and all members were 18 years and over. The groups were comprised of three types of group members. Some members were offenders, and other members had never committed an offence in their lives but displayed other problem behaviours that they wanted changing to improve their lives. The third type of group member were professional colleagues from many different types of organisations and professional bodies who wanted to learn more about relaxation training instruction along with anger management techniques. All group members were known to each other by their first names only, and none knew what category of status had brought them to group membership (apart from myself), unless they chose to self-disclose their status to other group members. As I wanted to research and analyse the efficacy of my work year upon year (with it being highly new and unconventional at the time), I needed the unadulterated data of both offending and non-offending membership, as I was dealing with health hope and happiness issues as well as specific problematic client responses to certain situations.

Through a two-hour weekly group programme, spread over twenty-four weeks, and the expected weekly homework practise of all group members of the above methods taught in group sessions,  I was eventually able to identify the composition and distinction between one response pattern and another. This enabled me to advance my own knowledge and developing working methods for changing involuntary responses in one’s behaviour pattern to voluntary responses. This was done on the presumption that when given a choice to either do or not do something, that most people (offender and non-offender alike) usually chose to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing. I also found that by emphasising the health, hope, and happiness objectives of my programmes that offenders might more readily stop viewing themselves as offenders and start to realise that they were much more!

At the very heart of every two-hour weekly programme session, 45 minutes was devoted to teaching group members a specific relaxation scene which they would practice nightly in bed before going to sleep. My success rates in all my objectives set turned out to be three times better than the national average figures of the Probation Service for non-reoffending. By approaching all group members in non-criminal terms, I was able to use the skills I had learned from my age of 11/12 years as a Probation Officer in my early thirties with great success.

In my 60th year, I had two serious heart attacks and I was warned to take it easy, which I have done ever since. In my 70th year of life, I developed terminal blood cancer, I had two nine-month courses of chemotherapy, and three years of blood transfusions every two to three weeks. In addition, I  have contracted another three different cancers, I have had 11 cancer operations in total, and 40 sessions of radiotherapy. I currently have three different body cancers, and on October 30th, I am scheduled to enter the hospital again to have another cancer removed from my facial area. Given that I will have had seven cancer operations plus forty sessions of radiotherapy within the past two years, without my ability to relax my mind and body, I would never have had the strength to get through these. 

Believe it or not, I take every day of my life today ‘nice and easy’, not because I have to but because I choose to.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 26th October 2020

26/10/2020

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As I have no known Facebook birthday contacts today I dedicate my song to anyone out there who is celebrating their birthday and I wish them an enjoyable day.
My song today is ‘Just Between You and Me’. This song was popularised by Charlie Pride and was also recorded by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner. The latter two released it as their first collaborative studio album in January 1968. It peaked at Number 8 on the Billboard ‘Hot Country LP’s Chart’. Around the same time, Charley Pride recorded the song. 

Born in 1934, Charley Pride, who had been an American professional baseball player, became a business owner, a guitarist, and then a successful singer. His greatest musical success came in the early to mid-1970s when he became the best-selling performer for RCA Records since Elvis Presley. During the peak years of his recording career (1966–87), he garnered 52 top-10 hits on the Billboard ‘Hot Country Songs’ chart, 30 of which made it to Number 1. Charley Pride is one of a few Afro-Americans to become a member of the ‘Grand Ole Opry’. He was inducted into the ‘Country Music Hall of Fame’ in 2000.

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When I worked as a mill manager in Cleckheaton during the mid-1960s, despite being 27 years old at the time, I had progressed as high in the textile industry as any working-class man could reasonably expect to do in their lifetime. I obtained a position as foreman in a finishing firm at the age of 24 years old. There were another five foremen at the mill; four who worked on days and one who worked on the night shift. We each supervised our own department in the mill and were paid a monthly salary with an added monthly bonus which was influenced by the production levels of our individual departments.

At the time, all the foremen (except me) were in their late forties and fifties, and one was 63 years old. My own starting salary was around 50 percent more than what I had earned at my previous textile employment where I had been a ‘working foreman’ after I returned from living in Canada. I was engaged to be married at the time and planned to wed after my fiancée had completed her teacher’s training course at Bradford College, two years later. I was well content with my increased salary at my new job. The mill owner also doubled as the mill manager during day-time hours. He was nearing retirement age, so he let it be known that his successor as mill manager ‘could’ come from within the group of the six foremen at the mill.

Consequently, there was a great deal of backbiting between some of the foremen, all of whom fancied getting the top job one day when the mill manager retired. The other five foremen were constantly trying to impress the mill manager wherever possible at the expense of their fellow foremen. They were also very secretive about any other foreman finding out how much salary they were being paid. They were each believed that they had more in their monthly salary than most of their foremen colleagues yet were fearful that they might have less than some! As a previous trade-union shop steward, I could easily see how the crafty mill owner was playing one foreman off against another with his ‘divide and rule tactics’. I even remember him telling me after he had interviewed me, and gave me the foreman position at the firm, “Keep your salary to yourself as you will be resented by foremen much older than you are, especially the ones who have been in their positions over ten years. Should they learn that you are being paid as much as they are, you will be unpopular!”

The upshot was that within one year of working as a foreman at the finishing firm, I was earning as much as all the other foremen. Indeed, after the bonuses were taken into account, I learned that I earned half as much again as one of the foremen who was in his fifties. Unknown to myself at the time, I was being provisionally groomed to supervise over one hundred workers in the Finishing Department on the night shift. The present foreman who supervised the night shift was close to retirement and he was returning unsatisfactory production figures each month. The mill owner wanting to be rid of him, and to be replaced with a better foreman at the earliest opportunity. The night foreman was popular with the men he was supervising. He had risen from the shop floor ranks and had fallen into the trap of trying to keep a foot in both camps (being a foreman as well as a regular workmate). In short, he was a soft touch as far as the men on the night shift were concerned, and they took full advantage of his amiable nature and the fact that he had once been one of them.

One morning I was called into the mill manager’s office and I was asked to be the night-time supervisor. I was told that my position would be as ‘supervising foreman’ to begin with and that I could anticipate myself progressing to the position of ‘under manager on nights’ if I could significantly improve the nightly output of the men. Although it was not spelled out, it was intimated that if things worked out on the night shift, and I could significantly improve the output of the workers, that within three or four years, the mill manager position would become vacant when he retired, and that ‘a suitable replacement’ would be sought; in-house if possible, and I would be the favourite to fill the vacant post. 

Wanting to get as much money as possible earned before my wedding, and being less than two years away from my planned marriage, I had nothing to lose, so I agreed to undertake the supervision on the night shift. Within one month of supervising the night shift at the finishing mill, it was plain that the workers I supervised were no different from any other night-shift workers in the country. Their level of pay was set at a standard hourly rate, and as a bonus was rarely paid to non-salaried staff, they could only depend on overtime hours to earn extra. Apart from getting a night-shift allowance, they inconvenienced their family life greatly by working five nights a week for little more than what day workers earned. The night workers worked four ten-hour shifts from Monday night to Friday morning. As the workers could earn no extra money in their wage packets however hard they laboured, they had no incentive to ever increase their production levels from that of ‘the least amount they could get away with’. 

It soon became apparent to me that they might be willing to accept a different kind of cooperative bonus, especially as they got their perks a different way. What the workers could not gain in monetary terms, they took in end-of-shift naps. During the last two hours of their night shift, all the men started to wind down in various ways. Their machines would be run slower, and their total work would be eked out until an hour before clocking-out time. Then, some might play cards, others talk in groups, and a good number of them would even have an hour’s nap inside a skip while another worker kept an eye out for the prowling foreman. Before I had been there less than a month, a number of what was known in trade-union terms as ‘Spanish Practices’ became clearer to me.  

As a night foreman and under manager, who was younger in years than almost all the employees under my supervision, if I was to succeed in my ultimate aim of increasing monthly production, I would have to gain the trust of over one hundred men, as well as being able to persuade them that it was in their interest to increase their shift production for no increased wages! This was no mean feat as jobs were plentiful at the time, so threatening to fire anyone would cut no ice with them. Also, there was a trade-union worker representative who worked on the night shift, and any threat of job loss would merely bring about a strike once reported to the day-time shop steward. It soon became apparent that my own previous experience as a textile shop steward had been as attractive to the mill manager when I originally applied to fill the post of Finishing Foreman as had been my extensive textile knowledge and the position of ‘working foreman’ I had held in my previous job.

To cut to the chase, I asked the workers to increase their output by 10 percent and arrived at an understanding with them. I agreed that providing there was no shoddy work or damage when they had completed their new quota for the night, they could sleep for the last two hours of their shift without needing to hide about it. This arrangement was done on the understanding that nobody told the day workers about it and even kept it from their marriage partners. I also let it be known to the trade union representative that I would turn a blind eye if a colleague ‘clocked them in’ should they ever turn up for work late because of any emergency at home, providing they returned their nightly output required by the end of their night shift.

If anyone has ever worked permanent night shifts, they would know that it is not called ‘the graveyard shift’ for no reason. For starters, it is unnatural for men or women to be working in the dark of night and trying to sleep in the sunlight. Knowing that while you work through the night that the rest of the day workers are either out enjoying themselves, or sleeping in their beds with their wives, eventually depresses one. Spring and summertime is the very worst time of the year for night-shift workers to come to terms with, knowing that while normal society is wide awake during the day, that they are trying to sleep through the bright summer days. The family life of the night worker is a wholly disruptive lifestyle that can never be fully adjusted to. It is no good for marital relationships, and it plays havoc with one’s body clock. No matter how many years a person works on the night shift, they never really get used to it. There is never one weekend throughout the year when the night-shift worker does not feel tired or is able to fully enjoy their leisure hours as a daytime worker can. The only occasions when I have known the night-shift to work for any man (or woman) is when their marriage is already over, but separation is resisted because of the sake of the children or the unwillingness to go through a divorce and its necessary upheaval in one’s routine and financial cost.

The night-shift workers gradually went along with my suggestion, and once they saw that the arrangement was to our mutual satisfaction (they were aware that my bonus was being increased proportionately to their increased output), they knew I would stick to my part of our ‘unofficial understanding’. Over the following year, I satisfied the expectations of the mill owner and the workers I supervised on the night shift. I was duly appointed ‘under manager on nights’, with another salary increase as promised and my prospects seemed brighter than ever. As to my mutual arrangement with the workers, it remained ‘just between me and them’. 

Then, having attained the position of night manager and a much-increased wage, I decided that working on nights was not any longer a job for me and that I wanted a complete change of career direction. The night shift had given me much time to think about my life and what I really wanted out of it. I also had this nagging conscious which kept reminding me that I was not honouring a deal I had struck during my childhood years. 

As a boy aged 11 years, I had suffered from the effects of a serious traffic accident that almost killed me and prevented me from walking for three years. As I lay dying in Batley Hospital with multiple injuries that included a damaged spine, I recalled the words that were being spoken at the end of my bed. From a semi-conscious state, as I lay in a sideward, I heard a hospital doctor tell me parents that I would not live through the night. Not wanting to die at such a young age, I promised my Maker there and then, that if He let me live that I would spend the rest of my life doing good work. My Maker kept His side of the bargain, and during one night shift at the mill, I realised that I had not yet honoured mine.

I eventually decided to give up my textile position, and instead, I took an ordinary shop-floor job in a Brighouse mill on days. My income was instantly reduced by two thirds and I was no longer salaried. However, my nights were now free, enabling me to go back to night school three times a week for over two years. I had run away from school to join the workforce when I was aged 15 years, just before I took my GCE O-Level examinations, and so I decided it was time to return to educational studies and to complete ‘unfinished business’ at the age of 27 years.  

I went back to school and complete the education I had previously abandoned, and I decided to qualify sufficiently to be accepted into a university of my choice. After passing my examinations and gaining a university place at Bath University, I initially planned to become a History teacher and to seek a post in a school that was in a deprived area. As a second string to my bow, I simultaneously applied to go on a ‘Probation Officer’s Training Course’ but did not hold out much hope of success because of my previous experience on the wrong side of the law. 

I fortuitously got accepted on both courses within two weeks of each other, and I decided to become a Probation Officer as a career change. I decided to become a poacher turned gamekeeper, a thief-taker instead of a lawbreaker. With my own working-class background and council estate upbringing, I believed that I was better placed than the usual Probation Officer who usually came from a middle-class background to help the offender. I believed that I had a much better chance of convincing someone with a similar background to the one I had experienced of there being a better way to get by in life by going straight. 

Every moment of my 27-year career with the West Yorkshire Probation Service was personal confirmation that I was in the right job. Helping offenders stop offending, helping addicts break their lengthy addictive practices, helping stressful people learn to relax and reduce unhealthy tension levels, helping angry and fearful people to regain control over their anger and fear levels, and essentially helping anyone with whom I would work to increase their health, hope and happiness factors was much more than a work experience; it was a vocation that I loved. Unfortunately, a disability led me to retire prematurely at the age of 53 years. I then concentrated on being an author and have now had sixty-four published books (with all book-sale profits going to charitable causes).

I never once regretted my change in careers, and ‘History’ became a lifelong interest of mine. Now, please note that what I’ve told you in this post about the ‘Spanish Practices’ of the old textile firms, and ‘my turning of a blind eye’ when one night-shift worker ‘clocked’ a workmate when a home emergency caused him to be late is ‘Just Between You and Me’.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 25th October 2020

25/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to four people who celebrate their birthday today.

First, I wish a happy birthday to Lynne Ford, the wife of my cousin John who lives in Wales. John’s father (Billy) and my dad were brothers. Their relationship was so close that when I was born, (being their firstborn of seven children) the obvious name for me to be Christened that my parents chose was ‘William’ (after my maternal grandfather, William Fanning). This name allowed me to be called ‘Billy’ (after my father’s closest brother) for the rest of my life by all Forde family members. Only my family and friends who have known me since childhood ever called me Billy. To the rest of the world, from adulthood, I have been known as Bill or given my Sunday name William, in a professional capacity.

The other three birthday celebrants today who we wish happy birthday to are (1) Lyn Munton who lives in Oakworth, West Yorkshire (2) Marion Donnerley who lives in Hastings, East Sussex (3) John Paxman who lives in Brightlingsea( a coastal town in Essex). Enjoy your special day. Bill xxx

My song today is ‘For the Good Times’. This song was written by Kris Kristofferson and was first recorded by singer Bill Nash in 1968 before appearing on Kristofferson's own debut album in April 1970. After a recording by Ray Price became a Number-1 hit single in June of that year, the song established Kristofferson as one of country and popular music's top songwriters while giving Ray Price his first chart-topping country and western song in 11 years. 

This song went on to win a Grammy for Kristofferson as the composer. Ray Price’s recording of it was also awarded a Grammy. ‘For the Good Times’ was placed in the ’40 saddest songs of all time’.

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For some of us, the good times of today can become the sad thoughts of tomorrow. I wonder how many of us have ever come to bitterly regret what we once had but have since lost; particularly when the loss referred to is the love of another through bereavement and the happiness that you shared with them in the best of times?
All lovers who have a soulmate who dies before them will naturally grieve the loss of their loved one, and for many, their lives will never be the same again. Indeed, how could it possibly be? When half of one whole is missing, the remainder can never amount to what it was before the absence. And yet, the death of a beloved spouse awaits all who are fortunate to have shared a long and happy life with a loving partner. For those happy few, their pleasure will evermore be like the faded flower, and their fond remembrance will become the fragrant and lasting perfume stored in their memory bank. Such lucky people will be sad that it is over until they meet their loved ones again in another life but will rejoice until the day they die that it happened!

The older one grows in age, the more often we engage in subtle ways to avoid its advancement by making ourselves feel and look younger. Occasionally, we will witness such vanity parades strutting our public sidewalks with ‘mutton dressed up as lamb’. How often have we seen a woman in her fifties dress in the fashion and cut of a woman in her twenties, but instead of the hour-glass body shape she once possessed, she now resembles an overfilled sack of spuds? We watch her walk in heels that nobody wanting a sound footing would ever place on their feet, and wearing a short skirt that begs forgiveness that it cannot disguise the generous girth and the flabby folds of flesh within its waistband, or the cellulite legs which underpin its ‘show all’ high-cut hemline. As for male vanity, does anyone believe that the 77-year-old Paul McCartney or the 80-year-old Cliff Richard doesn’t wash out their grey hair weekly with the aid of ‘Grecian 2000’?  Far better and more gracious in old age to go bald and grey and to look one’s natural age, I say. After all, whether one is called Elton or Alma, having hair implanted into a bald scalp is no less artificial a cosmetic makeup operation than enlarging the size of female boobs from a size A-cup to a 38D is.

Whoever we are, it is only natural to cling on to our happiest moments and times in life and to try and forget our unhappier experiences. Our only aide memoir after the event is our internal diary. Our long-term memory is often the only account we may keep of our past lives; of keeping track of who we were, where we were, what we did, who with, and how much we enjoyed the experience. The value of our better moments only become evident when the happy moment becomes the memory of good times gone. Many people could not accurately remember in their older lives how many people they had made love with, but I’d bet a pound to a penny, you never forget the first person you made love with or the first person you truly loved (whether or not they were one and the same).

There have been times when I have been asked to go to a party or somewhere else that I wasn’t particularly looking forward to with pleasurable anticipation, and yet, by the end of the night I was highly surprised to have had a great time. Pleasure is seldom found where it is sought, and our brightest fires are often kindled by unexpected sparks. And, so it is with people, I have found. There have been many a person (upon first meeting) that turned out to be the opposite of what they appeared to be once one got to know them better and they let down their guard in your presence. 

One of the things I have always endeavoured to do is to never leave any relationship behind without having learnt one significant thing from it that I can take away, adopt within my own behaviour pattern, and positively use within my next relationship. I have also learned from my past experiences one specific emotionally irony that presents itself in human behaviour. Isn’t it strange how we often cry at the best of times in our lives and shed tears of joy because we are truly happy, and then on other occasions, we may laugh during our worst moments to disguise our fear or embarrassment? The former illustrates emotional celebration and cheer, while the latter behaviour illustrates human detraction and avoidance behaviour at play.

So, let us celebrate the good times we have had, the good relationships we have experienced, the good people we have known in our lives, and all the good experiences we have encountered on our travels through life. There is no way that any of us will ever forget the bad times, but if we are wise men and women, we will make our happiness a pleasure never regretted or repented. As mere mortals of the flesh and fragile fragments of humanity, at our worst of times, especially at the end or the loss of a beautiful relationship with a loved one, the only thing we have to hang onto is the fond memory of the happiness and good times we once had.

‘For the good times’ is an excellent toast to one’s past, present and future.

Love and peace Bill xxx


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Song For Today: 24th October 2020

24/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to four people who celebrate their birthday today. (1) Michelle Gaizely who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. (2) Shirley Holloway who also lives in Carrick-on-Suir. (3) Jackie Porrit Hartley who lives in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, England. (4) Joan McDonald who lives in Sidney, Australia. Enjoy your special day, Ladies. Bill xxxx

My song today is ‘Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends’. This song was written by Kris Kristofferson and was first recorded by Bobby Bare in 1971. Later, Kris Kristofferson recorded the song with Rita Coolidge for their final duet album, ‘Natural Act, and later with Mark Knopfler for ‘The Austin Sessions’.
 
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If you were offered the opportunity of looking back over your life and changing things, would you take up the offer? I suspect that many people might welcome the opportunity of correcting any pass wrongs they did. Perhaps you would not have chosen to love and trust the person who then went on to betray you? Or would you have ever married the spouse who later divorced you? 

I would not correct any of my past. Not because it was perfect, and not because I did not have any wrongs done to me, or perpetrated by me!  There would be no hurtful episode in my life that I would choose to erase from it; no painful experience would be expunged from my history. The reason I would choose not to alter my past rests in my desire not to remove any learning which stemmed from it; not even the bad and the hurtful experiences I encountered or were responsible for. I believe that it is largely through our experiences that we learn our future responses to similar situations we may find ourselves a part of. I hold the view that the best lessons that remain with us longest are the ones we learn from our direct experiences and previous mistakes. I believe that because all good people are capable of doing bad things sometimes, that all people who might be considered bad are also capable of doing good things occasionally. Consequently, if my belief holds true, then there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad people’ per se, only people who do either behave well or badly, lovingly, or wickedly. I realise that these beliefs of mine are in danger of offending the sensibilities and contradicting the strongly-held belief of others who have witnessed extreme harm, defilement, and murder to their loved ones, through the evil and wicked deeds of another, and that we may never be able to share camps in this perspective; and my heart goes out to them.

In my life, I have encountered many people who have had their fortune told, or who regularly read their daily horoscope in the magazine and newspaper. I have known many a person visit a séance, or attend a spiritualist meeting where a clairvoyant purports to receive messages from the dead. My own historical reading informs me that for centuries, scientists and persons with the most eminent brains in the country have used the position of the stars in the heavens to chart their actions and destiny, even to the point of timing a marriage, plotting a death or waging a war. I have also known many people who engage in astrology; a practice that attempts to explain one’s future through the movement, alignment, and position of the planets. There are many people of superstitious mind who will fear the breaking of a mirror, or who avoid walking beneath a ladder, crossing a black cat, or going out on a Friday the 13th of the month just because it represents to them a bad omen of a possible future unwanted event in their life.  Most of the people I refer to here are ordinary folk and would not be considered weirdoes, even by the most rational among us. There are even millions (like me) who believe in the supernatural presence and omnipotent power of a spiritual being called Jesus or many other figures from the other religions of the world.

On the other side of the human coin, there are innumerable behavioural anticipations which lead to our human experiences of pain and pleasure or safety and danger. If a madman waving a knife in the air and yelling “Kill! Kill!” runs towards you with a menacing face and looking determined to do you damage, do not be surprised if you automatically do something to avoid the anticipated danger. Similarly, if a smiling person you are introduced to offers you their hand to shake without speaking, do not be surprised if you automatically shake it! Our previous experiences are automatically stored and collated in our memory bank so that the next time we enter a similar situation, that our minds do not have to waste time and energy ‘thinking about’ what to instruct our body muscles to do, and we automatically take the appropriate action. Were the mind not to store automatic body instructions, none of us would ever possess enough body energy to get through our day. Were we to think about every single sequence of our behaviour patterns, we would not be able to tie our shoelaces or go through the motions of driving our car with such ease and safety? Thus, all previous experiences shape and determine all future responses! 

Whether we are engaged in some process of human behaviour that results in us eating, drinking, having sex, awaiting a physical punishment, or falling from a great height, etc; according to all Behaviourists, our qualitative experience is undoubtedly shaped and determined by our previous experience in similar situations. Also, how we felt after that previous experience will lead us to anticipate how we will probably feel in advance of any future similar situation we find ourselves in. Therefore, as a professed Christian, and as an ardent Behaviourist, and as an Irish man who was born in a country that is steeped in superstition and folklore, I must include myself in this long list of rational and irrational human contractions.

I once worked with a man at ‘Harrison Gardeners’ textile and dying company in Liversedge, West Yorkshire. This man was called Arthur, and he was a real ‘Jack the lad’ in more ways than one. He was always telling jokes and spoiling the jokes of other workmates. His most annoying behaviour was to spoil the joke or the story of another person seconds before the punch line was delivered. Whenever we were in the canteen at lunchtime or during the afternoon break, there would always be somebody telling a story he had previously heard, or a joke. Arthur would wait until the end approached, and as the punch-line was about to be delivered, he would shout out the ending; leaving the narrator of the story disappointed and somewhat deflated.

As the author of over sixty books since 199O, one of the writer ploys I would always use was to deliberately lead the reader down the wrong path towards the direction of a particular ending of the story; only to change the ending at the very last moment. 

As a lifelong romantic, I would have hated to begin any relationship with any woman who I ever courted, knowing in advance ‘how the story ended’. For my part, the chase always proved more exciting than the capture, and ‘not knowing’ how the hunt would turn out was a large part of the pleasure anticipated.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 23rd October 2020

23/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to three people who celebrate their birthday today. (1) Lily Walsh who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland. Lily is the widow of my best friend Tony who died earlier this year. (2) David Simpson who lives in my own birthplace of Portlaw, County Waterford, Ireland (3) Howard Jackson who lives in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. We wish Lily, David, and Howard a happy birthday. Enjoy your special day.

My song today is ‘Truly’. This the title of the debut solo single by singer-songwriter Lionel Richie.  Richie wrote the song and co-produced it with James Anthony Carmichael. ‘Truly’ made Number 1 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in November 1982. In addition, ‘Truly’ made the Top 10 in the United Kingdom, where the song peaked at Number 6. This song won a Grammy Award for Richie in the category ‘Best Male Pop Vocal Performance’. 

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The truest thing a person can ever be in this life is themselves. Shakespeare knew this when he placed the words in the mouth of his character Polonius when giving advice to his son Laertes on how to behave whilst at university: “ This above all, to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Hamlet: Act 1: Scene 3: William Shakespeare Play.

Ask all the people in the next queue you pass, “What would you wish for if I could grant you one wish only?” and incorporated somewhere within all of their individual answers would be ‘happiness’. Unfortunately, we have been born into a materialistic society in the West, and we associate impoverishment with a lack of money. When anyone attaches themselves to money, position, property, or power, they can never be truly happy. 

If there is one good thing to come out of this tragic pandemic Covid-19 crisis we have spent the past eight months living through, it is the knowledge of what really matters in our lives does not cost us one penny. We have all come to understand the crucial importance of the freedoms we once took for granted like having visitors in our homes, who we want, and when we want them there. 

Never again will any of us take for granted the kissing and hugging our friends and family, attending weddings without our faces masked, and being able to go to funerals and family events where close association and hugging can take place between the bereaved. Who among us could ever have imagined it being a precious freedom just to be able to say a final ’Goodbye’, by holding the hand of our loved ones on their death bed, and watching their coffin descend below the cemetery ground. What freedom can we enjoy once more when we are able to go to the pub or have a meal out with one’s friends, mix and mingle in larger crowds to commemorate special occasions, watch football from the stands, attend the cenotaph in reverence on Armistice Sunday, or just being able to walk in the woods and across the moorlands, and breathe in pure fresh air instead of the Covid-19 virus! Perhaps we will all emerge better people from these restrictive times we have been obliged to live through and truly come to appreciate what really matters to us in our daily lives.

I will never forget one client I worked with in Huddersfield when I served as a Probation Officer for 27 years in the ‘West Yorkshire Probation Service’. A relationship she had with the man she loved ended after 15 years together. While she had always loved her man, and still professed love for him, he had unfortunately stopped loving her and had found love with another woman and wanted a separation. She understood his position. It deeply hurt her, and she found it extremely difficult to readjust to. The thing I best remember was her saying was something to the effect “ I decided that if we had to separate and go our own ways after 15 years, I wanted it to be a peaceful parting of the ways in gratitude to the love we once shared. I realised that the proper thing to do was to let go and allow him to go live with the other woman without feeling guilty for having to leave me. Finding out that he now loved another person and not me cannot have come easy.” What she was demonstrating to me was an unselfishness that is born out of ‘true love’ for another. She possessed the grace and wisdom to know that when you truly love someone, the only thing you want for them is to be happy; even if it’s not with you. I recall thinking that this man had made some ghastly mistake which he would come to bitterly regret with the passing of time.

Finally, I will end today’s post with one of my mother’s truth that she never abandoned. My mother was always a dreamer and through any wisdom and sound advice she passed to me, she helped my dreams to come true more than she could have imagined possible. I always knew that she loved me because she told me so every day of my life, and never stopped believing in me. Through the copious advice she would give me (usually uninvitedly whether or not I wanted it!), she taught me that when you stop following your dreams, you stop living in hope of a better and happier tomorrow ever dawning. “To live your life fully, Billy” my mum used to tell me, ‘you need to be happy to be alive and to always give thanks for your journey through life”.  

I have heard many people in my lifetime pose the question as to whether such a thing as ‘love’ exists, or ask if is it a construct of our imaginations to justify and rationalise being closely bonded with another. I know that ‘love’ exists, because I believe that not one of us would have ever existed without its presence in the heaven above or the earth below. I believe that none of us would ever have been born and the world as we know it never have existed had the love of God not created it and made human birth possible. All my childhood, I lived in the constant presence and reach of ‘love’.  All I needed to do to touch love was to hang onto my mother's apron strings. 

My mother was my first true embodiment of ‘love’, which is little more than a word until someone significant comes into your life and gives it meaning and purpose for its wonderful existence’, and my wife Sheila shall remain my last image of 'love'.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 22nd October 2020

22/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my nephew Lee Brown who lives in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and my dear friend Lynne Green (formerly Lynne Dransfield) who lives in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, and my Facebook friend, Jackie Fitzsimmons who lives in North Chili, New York. Lee, Lynne, and Jackie celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your special day. Bill x

My song today is ‘Redneck Girl’. This song was written by David Bellamy and was recorded by American country music duo ‘The Bellamy Brothers’. It was released in September 1982 as the first single from the album ‘Strong Weakness’. The song was the sixth number one country hit for ‘The Bellamy Brothers’. 

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The term ‘Redneck Girl’ in American slang refers to a woman with a sexy disposition, a sassy attitude; a truly independent woman who is a daddy’s girl. She loves fishing, drives a truck, and takes no truck from anyone seeking to give her a hard time or lead her down a path she doesn’t want to go down. In American jargon, a Redneck Girl is ‘a bad ass woman’ who loves country music and who doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty. A true Redneck Girl can be a Tomboy at heart but knows how to be a Lady as well. She is never vulgar. Her image fits in nicely with what any pioneer of the wild west hoped to find in a wife with whom to share their life; someone who doesn’t mind hard work and is prepared to get her hands dirty and is willing to be the type of woman most men would want her to be at different times of the day and night. 

The closest I ever came to meeting a ‘Redneck Girl’ was in Kentucky, during a brief stay there when I lived in Canada and managed to see a few American States occasionally. My Redneck Girl had prospered in life and had progressed from cowgirl to lady and was the proud owner of a Haberdashery store when we met and spent some time together, but that’s a story for another time!

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

21/10/2020

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Song For Today: 20th October 2020

20/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Angie Heard from Forrest City in Arkansas, U.S.A. It is Angie’s birthday today. Enjoy your special day, Angie, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is, ‘Remember When’. This song was written and recorded by American country music artist, Alan Jackson. Released in October 2003, it spent two weeks at Number 1 on the U.S. Billboard ‘Hot Country Songs’ chart in February 2004 and peaked at Number 29 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart. 

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Whatever stage a person is at in their life should represent a different part of one’s journey through life. Each phase of life is different and brings corresponding emotions of pleasure when things are going well. While most people would prefer to stay forever young, it will never happen, and even were it possible, I would not think it desirable. There is a time and place for each of us, and some stages of life are happier than others. Whatever remains our emotional experiences at each phase of life as we journey through, each stage is usually characterised by a predominant emotion.

Young children live mostly in a world of exploration and constant astonishment. No other stage in life can produce the ‘astonishment’ seen in a child’s face as they delicately hold a butterfly in the palm of their hands, or watch a spider weave a web, or see a ladybird slowly crawl up a little person’s hand, or see the reflective splash that can be created by jumping hard in an unsuspecting puddle. So, it is as each stage in an individual’s passage through life holds its own learning curve for the traveller.

Young teenagers seem filled with the added zest of life as they become more ‘daring’ in their games and pastimes. This usually occurs as they start to engage in experimental behaviours, in conjunction with their body changes. Older teenagers, on the other hand, become more aware of their ‘sexual identities’ as their bodies start to produce involuntary responses both above and below their waistlines at the sight and touch of the opposite sex.  In their mid to late teens, there is an estrogenic and a testosterone collision between the developing sexes which results in a sexual explosion, leading young men and young women to occasionally succumb to their physical desires and to jump in puddles of promiscuity together.

The marriage phase of life can ironically be that part of life’s journey where our decision making in choosing the right partner to wed, set up home, and start a family with is put to the most stringent of tests that any two people will ever be asked to negotiate together. The marital experiment can produce the widest of experiences for each of the couples ‘jumping the broomstick’ depending upon the satisfaction of the love match, along with their mutuality and compatibility in taste and all manner of customs and practices. In short, the individual experiences enjoyed, endured, or engaged in can depend greatly upon whether they meet one’s level of ‘marital expectation’. Nobody ever gets married with thoughts of ever getting divorced, but sadly in just over half of all marriages entered into this life-long experimentation will fail. There are many reasons which lead to a marital breakdown that are not necessary to go into here, but one I will cite is a weird peculiarity of human nature; the need of one marriage partner (usually the wife) to change the man she married as soon as the couple return from their honeymoon and crosses the threshold of domesticity. As soon as a new wife looks across at her new husband and thinks “That is certainly an area for improvement!” then the groom stops being her husband and becomes her ‘project’. 

The next life phase for most is parenthood, shortly followed by the seven-year itch when the shine has clearly rubbed off the couple’s sparkling love life and relationship.  The coming of children into the household makes much more of a mess in a father and mother’s life than any pile of dirty nappies ever could; much more than any non-parent could ever imagine.  Sleep is lost, weight is gained and marital stress between husband and wife becomes an increasing occurrence in the daily life of husband and wife. As the woman becomes a mother 24 hours a day to a dependent infant who cries loudly more than smiles cooingly the increased pressure of her multiple household roles has its toll. She is left with absolutely no time to be a wife or even a stressed individual with five minutes to spare, and this pressure is merely added to when her husband starts to feel left out of her attention and affections. There are only 24 hours in any day and she only has one pair of hands. It is their baby who now preoccupies her attention and has unfettered access to its mother’s breasts. Her husband feels pushed out and starts to think that he no longer counts in the equation of the distribution of love that his wife hands out. 

The young child develops and learns most of the behaviour they adopt from their homes, long before they enter the classroom of their first school.  I believe that the best way to make a child good is to make them happy, and the most certain way to make a child happy is to make them a part of a happy home. One thing that chimpanzees have taught me over the years when I watch a parent with its infant, is that the young should have fun!

While it should always be the parent’s aim to build children of strong character, it sadly remains too easy to break them down instead and make them feel insecure and unloved by failing to enthuse and compliment their efforts. Any parent who can pass enthusiasm along to their child provides them with a family estate of incalculable value when they die. I strongly believe that children are apt to live up to what their parents believe of them. One of the proudest things that please me about all my offspring is their non-racist attitudes. Each of my children possesses a natural sense of fairness, equality, and justice they display as adults. I always taught them that in the diversity of mankind there is a beauty and strength never to be found in any manner of uniformity. Not one of my children has a racist thought in their head or feeling in their hearts, and all enjoy friends of different skin tone, colour, religion, and nationality. 

Children should not be forced to grow up too soon. Their childhood years should be ones to treasure and be filled with memories to be looked back on in later life in fond remembrance. On the other hand, there is a parental responsibility that children should not be allowed to enter the adult world unprepared for what they might face. We do our children no service by overprotecting them from the cold realities of the world. As Walt Disney observed: “ Most things are good, and they are the strongest things, but there are evil things too, and you are not doing the child a favour by trying to shield him/her from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good will always triumph over evil.”

If a couple can get through their first seven years of marriage with their trust in each other and fidelity remaining intact, they usually adjust to the following thirteen years as they gradually settle into their more independent lifestyles that run in tandem with maintaining a satisfactory family unit. 

Then, between the ages of 40-50 years (menopausal years) there is a change of life that sorely tests their marriage bond once more. Some men develop a growing dissatisfaction with any sex life that still exists outside the seasonal times of birthdays, Christmases, annual holidays, and complete lockdown periods during electricity blackouts and pandemic virus spread. Without realising it at first, both husband and wife allow their eyes the freedom to wander elsewhere as quick glances gradually develop into more searching visual observations. They probably become aware of a gradual increase in their flirting behaviours whenever in the presence of other attractive men and women but are unaware of the dangerous game they are now playing. Unknowingly, they have made themselves ‘emotionally vulnerable’ and more accepting of predatory advances by someone whom they find sensually appealing. By this stage in their journey through married life, the children have grown and flown the family nest, and a husband and his wife have more time to assess the overall situation and their part in it. They look at their spouse and think about the type of person they are living with and begin to ask themselves unpleasant facts they do not enjoy facing. Questions asked of themselves may include, “Am I happy? What am I getting out of life? What lies in store for the future? Is this enough or do I deserve more during the latter part of my life?” As they tussle with the answers they are in the process of deciding if they really want to maintain the status quo of marriage mediocre? At this stage, many marriages come to a natural end as it is reluctantly accepted by one or both partners that the ‘sell-by-date’ has passed, and what is left of their married shelf-life appears less attractive and romantically inclined than it once did. 

However, the marriages which carry on surprisingly grow from strength to strength. It is as though, having mentally, psychologically, physically, and emotionally decided to ‘’stay married’ to your spouse, you get on and start to make the best of custom and practice. Retirement often sees married couples out walking together again more often and it becomes self-evident that the wife has made progress in ‘her project’ as one sees her husband push the trolley of shopping around the supermarket as they discuss the price of bread this week and the merits of eating perfectly straight carrots at double the price of smaller bendy ones that have a longer tail on them!

If a married couple can get to the stage of old age holding hands, and are able to preserve their minds and bodies well enough to sit, stand, walk and perform their basic functions, they will be able to look back from their rocking chairs of contentment on the lives they have lived. As the husband and wife celebrate their golden wedding anniversary and looks across at each other fondly, they may each wonder in the secret alcoves of their own mind, “ If I were to live my life again, would I make the same choices?”

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 19th October 2020

19/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my great-nephew, Leon, who lives with his mother (my niece Sam Swales) up in Portlethen, Aberdeen, Scotland. My niece lost her partner in 2020 after he contracted Covid-19. I also dedicate my song today to Jacqueline Allum who lives in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada. Both Leon and Jacqueline celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your special day.

My song today is ‘What a Feeling’. This song is from the 1983 film ‘Flashdance’. The song was written by Italian composer Giorgio Moroder (music), Keith Forsey and Irene Cara and (lyrics), and was performed by Cara. 

In addition to topping the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart, and becoming Irene Cara's only Number 1 song, it earned a platinum record, the ‘Academy Award for Best Original Song;  the ‘Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song’, and the ‘Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance’. In 2004 it finished at Number 55 in ‘AFI’S 100 Years of 100 Best Songs’ survey of top tunes in American cinema. The song reached the Number 2 spot in the UK charts, and in 2008, the song was ranked at Number 26 on Billboard’s ‘All-Time Top 100’. 

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I have always held my feelings to be the language of my soul, whatever my mental or physical state of being. I believe that if you learn to be your honest self and ‘call it as you see it’ (in respectful terms and appropriate language of course), others will feel more comfortable in your presence, even when they do not concur with what you say and believe. So, be who you are, because in the larger picture of one’s contentment levels, those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind!
I come from a family who was emotionally expressive, and my mother always taught her seven children (of whom I was her firstborn) to give expression to our feelings at the moment of their birth. Through her own example of living her life in the most positive of ways, she essentially taught me that ’ honest feelings’ combined with ‘a desire to bring about’ is the true motivational force behind all successful endeavour and creative demonstration. I loved my mum dearly, and although she was a most wonderful person who was loving in nature, kind in disposition, generous to a fault and as accepting, tolerant and forgiving as one could possibly be, she was by no means ‘perfect and without flaw’.

As a human, mum occasionally experienced feelings of disappointment, yearning, envy, fear, and anger, just like most of us. It was not the fact that mum experienced negative feelings that I draw attention to, but more to what she did with her negative feelings. In short, she had the ability of a master magician to transform her negative thoughts and feelings into positive ones. While it took me the whole of my working life (working on response patterns of behaviour, as well as researching such work) to understand the intricacies that enjoin the sequence of one’s thoughts, feelings and actions, my mother was able to operate this process without being aware of what she was doing, and how she did it! The home in which I grew up prepared me well for any difficulties in my life that followed. My mother (more than my father) led me to understand that feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, and communication is open and expressively honest. She taught me that such is the kind of atmosphere that fosters a nurturing family. 

Over my own lifetime of studying and examining human response patterns, I would confirm the indisputable relationship between the sequencing and impact of our Thoughts-Feelings-Actions within our response patterns and on the behaviour we display. The ‘thought’ always comes first to our mind: it determines the nature of the ‘feeling’ that follows, and the feeling that is emoted shapes the likelihood of the ‘action’ which ensues. While it is our thoughts that create our feelings and emotions, and our feelings which shape our actions, it is our perspective on the entire process that creates our reality.

During my working life as a Probation Officer, one of the most difficult pieces of behaviour I encountered in the response patterns of problematic clients was the tendency to ‘avoid’ instead of confront, face, and deal with! It is very foolish for individuals to establish an avoidance pattern of behaviour in seeking to reduce their stress level as ‘avoidance’ militates against ‘coping and confronting’, and increases stress, not minimises it! We should always acknowledge our feelings. Trying to avoid the feelings we have does not make them go away. Even our sleeping pattern reflects this fact. What the mind and body refuse to deal with during daytime hour, our dreams will resurrect in the night for nocturnal consideration and worry during our sleep. It is like hiding behind the sofa when watching a scary movie! The fright remains present in the body. 

Living people (as opposed to hardened avoiders) do not make excuses for their emotions. They accept that feelings(both good and bad) come as part of the human package of living, and they embrace their feelings and walk with them on their journey as they learn how to best deal with them. So, learn to express your feelings and not repress them. We destroy ourselves when we try to stop feeling the emotions we have and need to express.  Repress your emotions instead of expressing them, and in time after they have accumulated sufficiently when the pressure gets too high to contain, the body implodes inwardly and explodes externally. If you bury your feelings within you, you will in time become a graveyard where all life remains extinguished. 

During my earlier childhood experiences, a wagon knocked me down and ran over me, and damaged my spine. For over six months, I lost all feeling beneath my waist and was told that I would never walk again. While I did not walk again for another three years, when the feeling of pain miraculously reappeared below my waistline, and all of the bones in my legs started to ache with a vengeance, I ‘rejoiced’ with the feeling of pain in my lower body. Pain in my legs meant that walking again was now a possibility, and hope was instantly restored to my life. Ever since that moment (and I currently have three different body cancers), pain reminds me that ‘I am still alive’. It is therefore incumbent on me that I live my life the best way I can and do not experience through the negativity of thought and emotions, a ‘living death’. As a Probation Officer, I occasionally saw some people use their pain as an excuse to hurt or emotionally blackmail others. We should never play with the feelings of others because even if we win the game (achieve our objective), we risk losing that person’s trust and respect for a lifetime.

Being the child of an Irish family who migrated to West Yorkshire during 1945 for better prosperity, for a number of years after landing in West Yorkshire (until our English neighbours found a new racial scapegoat in the West Indian migrant and the immigrant from Pakistan) our family would often face racial chants of “ Get back to your own country, you Irish tinker!”  While my Irish father would always give them a piece of his mind in return, my mother would be more understanding, tolerant and forgiving of their taunts. She always urged a greater understanding in us, as Irish migrants in England, Mum reminded us that we had come to a new land without the invitation of the English, and should therefore naturally expect some initial reluctance by the natives to accept us as ‘one of them’. Mum always advised us, “Just be your good self. Do that and you will be seen and accepted for the good person you are, and you will no longer be viewed as a threat!“ What my mother’s example taught me was that it is wiser to make a new friend instead of a new enemy and that it is better by far to make a new friend of an old enemy!

By being a happy person whose eyes always remained focused on the brighter side of life, mum taught us what it felt like to be around a happy person. As she went about her daily chores between the break of day and the dark of night, mum would always be singing and smiling. Through her example, she was indicating that a person can be as happy as they make their mind up to be. Her constant positivism was willingly accepted and adopted by me in later life. I soon grew to appreciate the immense power of positive thought upon the way one thought, felt, acted and was! I grew to understand that one of the greatest pieces of worldly wisdom that any individual can know it was that ‘I can make a difference’, and ‘you can make a difference’, and ‘we can make a difference’ if we want to enough!

Have a good day everyone and learn to trust your instincts more and yourself even more still! There is no more magical moment in one’s life than feeling the loving heart of another touch yours. And if it is true independence you desire, it is far better to follow one’s own gut feelings than to follow the opinion of the crowd or the baying of the mob.

Love and peace Bill xxx 
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Song For Today:18th October 2020

18/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to four people who are celebrating their birthday. First is Katie Jo Smith. Katie is my great-niece and is the daughter of my niece Clare Smith who lives in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire. Second is Walter Dunphy who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. The third birthday celebrant is Mary Walsh Collins who lives in County Kildare, Ireland, and the fourth person who is celebrating their birthday is John Hearne who lives in Waterford, Ireland. Enjoy your birthday, folks.

My song today is ‘Better Things to Do’. Written by Tom Shapiro, Chris Waters, and co-written and recorded by Canadian country music artist Terri Clark, this song was released in July 1995 as her debut single and served as the lead single to her self-titled debut album.

Written about Ray Davies's failing marriage during a depressive period in his life, the song was completed in 1981 and released as a single, reaching Number 42 in the UK and Number 92 in America. The single marked the band's first appearance in the UK charts since 1972.

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Too many people whose relationships or marriages fail, never emotionally resolve the hurt caused at the time of their breakup with a once loving partner. However happy they become in their life within a future relationship, the scars which remain from their past can sometimes wound for a lifetime and never completely heal. 

It is as though the hurt caused by one person to another was so great that it cannot be forgotten; that the other person hurt you so much that you cannot find it in your heart to ever forgive them. When any loving relationship ends in acrimonious circumstances and a form of hatred enters the situation, the aggrieved party can find it difficult to let go of their anger and sense of betrayal. Until they can let go of the past, there can be no solid base for any future.

I have known so many marriage breakdowns, where one of the separated parties seem to have a need to engage in some form of celebration when their ‘divorce absolute’ is eventually granted. I have never attended a ‘divorce party’ yet but I know they do occur. I have known many a divorced person relish being able to do the things following their marriage breakup and separation, that their ex-partner resented and prevented them from doing when together. 

One Irish woman, I supervised when I worked as a Probation Officer in Huddersfield really went to town after she had got rid of the man in her life who had made her life a complete misery from the start of their marriage. Her husband was neurotic and displayed symptoms of an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the extent of which did not become apparent until after their wedding. He would double-check everything such as locks, appliances, switches, and would spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom washing and re-washing his hands. The thing which irritated his wife the most was whenever she went to the loo. She would invariably leave the door open when she was on the throne, and whenever saw her with the loo door open, he would immediately pull it closed. Sometimes, when she unrolled some toilet paper to clean her bottom, there might be a sheet or two pieces left hanging down. Whenever he saw that, he would lift the toilet roll off its holder and carefully rewind the toilet roll back before replacing it for future use. After her divorce, she never closed the toilet door again, and as for the toilet-roll paper there were no gentle tugs to unwind the sheets; she would yank them with force and she would deliberately leave six or seven sheets strung across the bathroom floor each time she used it. She indicated that it gave her great satisfaction to behave like those playful pups on the television advertisements who prance around the house wrapped in toilet paper that is still being pulled. She even joked once with me that if she died before her ex, she might even consider having herself embalmed in toilet paper to annoy her ex-husband should he attend her wake and view her in the open coffin.

I recall making myself feel better after my own separation (which I never sought), by ‘going out dancing again’ within the month. Dancing had always been an activity I associated with being young and happy. After my divorce came through, I did not want my marriage ring but was unsure what to do with it. In the end, I sold it to a second-hand shop for a fraction of its value and bought an expensive bottle of vintage wine with the proceeds which I drank in the company of a lovely lady I was dating at the time. I remember thinking as I ordered the wine that was I to make a gesture of removing all vestige of my past marriage from my second finger, I might as well make it the grandest gesture I could, and an £80 bottle of vintage Claret seemed to fit the occasion nicely!

I have also known divorced parties buy themselves a new car, join an expensive golf club, take a once-in-a-lifetime holiday, have a facelift and tummy tuck, get themselves a toyboy, or start dating a young woman who is half their age and weight and is certain to give them a heart attack in the bedroom. I have even known one man to purposely have a baby with the new woman in his life. Indeed, I suspect that he deliberately parented a child with the woman he’d formed a relationship with after his acrimonious divorce to aggravate the disposition of his ex-wife and rub salt into her wounds. She had wanted to have children in their marriage but who could not conceive due to medical circumstances. The extent that a person will go to just to make a point or show that they have moved on with their life is mindboggling, and can also cost a bomb in toilet rolls!

This song today reminds me very much about getting on with one’s life after a relationship breakup. Have a nice day, everyone. 

Love and peace Bill xxx

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Song For Today: 17th October 2020

17/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to seven people who are celebrating their birthdays. They are (1) Donal O’Flynn who lives in Dublin, Ireland (2) Michael Waters who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland  (3) Barra O’Riagain who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland (4) Nora Galvin who lives in Waterford, Ireland (5) Lorna Long who lives in Waterford, Ireland (6) Marcello Costa Peuser who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina (7) Marie-Ann Mathot who lives in the Hague, Netherlands. Enjoy your special day and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘One Call Away’. This song by American singer Charlie Puth was released in August 2015. ‘One Call Away’ reached Number 12 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’, making it Puth's third top 40 single in the US, and his third highest-charting single as a lead artist to date. 

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I was born in 1942 and during my early upbringing, one of the aspects of which Great Britain used to be rightfully proud of was that all emergency services were only ‘one call away’. Have a poorly child in the middle of the night and a call to the local GP would guarantee that a home visit would be made within the hour. Today, home visits went out the window the very same day the doctors received a 20 percent wage rise, taking every GP in the country to over £100,000 annual salary.  Since that huge pay rise many years ago, the local doctor has been able to work only three days a week or retire ten years earlier than they had initially planned if they so choose. As for attempting to even see a local doctor at the surgery any day since March 2020. and the presence of Covid-19 has been a futile exercise. The most anyone can hope for today is a telephone call consultation during which the doctor is now able to diagnose blindly; and only then if you can get through on the telephone line. I don’t know about you, but I bet most of the receptionists today simply put the ‘line in use’ sound on whenever she wants a cup of tea, have a fag on the side, or to put on her makeup? 

In my youth, the country was properly policed, and every crime was investigated and had a much greater detection rate. Indeed, the clue to the strength of the police presence could be seen in its original title of the ‘Police Force’ and not the ‘Police Constabulary’. Whereas the term ‘Force’ related to its power, the term ‘Constabulary’ applies to its designated area. Ever since capital punishment was abolished for the murder of a police officer during the mid-1960s, police officers have been murdered in increasing numbers. The police no longer have sufficient officers to patrol our streets, and burglaries are no longer investigated. In fact, police numbers are so insufficient to combat the current crime rate that it is simply pointless to contact them if one expects to see someone that same day. The only reason to contact the police today is to obtain an insurance reference for a claim after your house has been burgled.

In my youth, if an ambulance was called out to a home in the event of a medical emergency, it would usually be there within ten minutes. Today, it can take hours, and even when it eventually arrives, there is no guarantee that there will be some operative on the ambulance who has both the equipment in the ambulance and the knowledge to use it, in order to save a life, like heart attacks. During the annual winter crisis, it is now usual to see our hospitals overcrowded with more patients than there are beds (or corridors) to accommodate them. Our hospitals are operated by overworked, underpaid, and under-resourced staff, while ambulances stand in long queues outside, unable to offload their ill passengers.

I will not itemise the full range of services that any member of the public could once call upon in time of need or emergency but sadly, no longer can. During the current pandemic virus that has pervaded the globe, mental health (the Cinderella of the NHS) has been greatly overlooked and too many people have taken their own lives during a state of acute depression and moments of desperation.

During my lifetime I have personally known of the lifeline that the ‘Samaritans’ have provided to so many people. The more modern pioneering founder, Dame Esther Rantzen, D.B.E. has established telephone lifelines for children (Childline) and older lonely citizens (The Silver line) to counter parental abuse and loneliness in old age.

There have always been the lifelines that a good friend has been able to provide. By being there for you, they are rarely more than ‘one call away’.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 16th October 2020

16/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to any couples who are struggling within their marriage, and where either one party or both within their relationship is still allowing unresolved emotional issues of their past to negatively impact upon their present relationship. 

My song today is, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinking’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)”. This country music song was made famous by singer Loretta Lynn in early 1967. The song was Loretta Lynn's first Number-1 country hit. It is one of her best-known songs and is included in all her live shows. Tammy Wynette and Gretchen Wilson also made a cover of this record.

One of Loretta Lynn's best-known compositions, “Don't Come Home A-Drinkin’( With Lovin’ on Your Mind)" is about an angry wife who is fed up with her husband coming home late every night very drunk and wanting to have sex. The song was based on Lynn's personal life. Her husband is known to have been a heavy drinker. The song was the first of many controversial songs sung by Lynn, and was considered very controversial for the time, but was ultimately quite popular. An album of the same name was released following the song's success, which also rose to the top of the charts.

Thanks in part to the success of this hit, Lynn became the first female Country entertainer to win the CMA Award, ‘Female Vocalist of the Year’ award in late 1967. In 1970, “Don't Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” was certified by the RIAA as a gold album making Loretta Lynn the first woman in country music to receive such an honour. In 2003, "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)" was placed at Number 47 on CMT’s ‘100 Greatest Songs in Country Music’.

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I have worked with many alcoholics as a Probation Officer in the past and I have even personally known a few in my lifetime. In almost every case I can think of (but not exclusively so) the real problem has not been how much the person drank or how often they got drunk or what social problems their drinking caused.  No! Most alcoholics I have known have had underlying issues which needed to be emotionally resolved before they were able to break their alcoholic addiction.

‘Alcoholism’ is best understood if it is seen as being an addiction and an illness as opposed to a ‘problem’ per se. True, being an alcoholic creates problems in the drinker’s life and produces problematic behaviour whenever the subject is ‘under the influence’, but being an alcoholic is the ‘consequence’ of the real problem as opposed to being the ‘cause’. There is usually a deep-seated unresolved emotional problem that has never been satisfactorily and healthily dealt with, and until that underlying problem is identified, faced, honestly expressed, discussed and emotionally resolved by the subject, their addiction to alcohol will remain unbroken.

The unresolved problem can be virtually anything which creates emotional disturbance for the individual which leads to the repression of the traumatic event. I have known abuse in childhood (physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual abuse) to be the underlying cause. I have even known repeated ‘bullying’ in earlier life act as a trigger to drinking more and more until addiction takes root. I have known of young mothers who were addicted to alcohol and/or drugs life either have their child taken from them by the Social Services Department; and in other instances, I have known them abandon their own infant, or voluntarily placed them in care because they were unable to cope, or put their child up for adoption.  In my own country of Ireland where I was born, it used to be common for a child born into a large family to be reared by an aunt or grandparents. I have even heard of aunts turn out to have been the child’s natural sister, and on occasions, even its mother!

Whatever the underlying reason happens to be, all that really matters as far as the alcoholic is concerned, is that the cause can be found in a situation of trauma and emotional disturbance in an earlier life experience/event which was never emotionally resolved because it was repressed and left at the back of one’s memory bank. Consequently, until it is emotionally resolved, the alcoholism cannot be effectively treated. To be emotionally resolved requires that the ‘initial event’ is acknowledged by the subject and is accepted by them as having happened. Then, the long-buried feelings about the situation which have been emotionally repressed can be finally expressed and dealt with; however angry the subject becomes. 

What determines the efficacy of the process is the subject being able to emotionally express. They need to do whatever best enables them to get ‘the emotionally disturbing thoughts and repressed memory’ out of their mind and body. 

I once supervised a woman who had been sexually abused by her father between the ages of 10-15 years of age. She told her mother what her father had done but her mother refused to believe her. Her mother’s refusal to believe her led her to feeling that she had been abandoned and violated by a mother and father who should have loved and protected her. She had never felt able to confront her father about his abuse of her throughout the five-year period of abuse. I advised her that the only way she could move on with her life was to physically confront her father with the consequences of what he had done (whether she decided to report him to the police many years after the event). Unfortunately, she said she could not because he had died during the intervening years and there was no father alive any longer to confront. She indicated that she had broken all contact with her family after she had left home at the age of 16 years, and although she heard of her father’s death, she had not attended his funeral ,and did not even know where he had been buried.

I told her that it was still possible to ‘bodily’ confront her father even if he was not alive. The young women in question was a member of one of my six-month ‘Relaxation Training and Assertion Training Group Programmes’ which I held in the ‘Huddersfield Probation Office’ for two hours weekly over a six-month period. She publicly revealed her abused situation to over thirty group members in one of the group discussions. All of my six-month groups would invariably bond closely during their long association and become very supportive of each other. Indeed, when a group member raised an issue which they were unable to handle (and which other group members might identify with), helpful suggestions of how the situation might be resolved would often follow. Learning what other group members had done in similar situations often produced vicarious learning (experiencing through the feelings or actions of another person).

After the group discussion, the group members were persuaded to accept my own proposition that even a corpse in the ground could be ‘emotionally confronted’ by an aggrieved person, even if their deceased state made them unable to respond. The upshot was that over the weeks ahead, we learned where the group member’s father had been buried and I asked her to allow me to take her to his graveside. 

On the day in question, two other group members accompanied us. They wanted to provide moral support to the group member who had been sexually abused. When we arrived at her father’s grave, I told her to tell her father forcibly (at the other side of the green sod), the wrong he had done to her and the harm his sexual abuse had caused. I asked her to tell him out loud about the emotional disturbance his sexual abuse had created for her, and the emotional repression that had prevented her living a normal life as an adult. I asked her to loudly tell him that because of what he did to her as a child that she had been unable to establish a healthy relationship with any man during her adult life. She was encouraged to express any of the anger she felt towards her father’s behaviour, even if she had to scream it out, which she did. For around ten minutes, she was very tearful and angry. She cried non-stop and swore a good many times at the corpse beneath the soil. She said afterwards that this process had helped her enormously.

Please note, that while this woman was not an alcoholic, she could so easily have been, had she channelled her repressed feelings in a different direction. However, her situation illustrates that long-held and emotionally repressed bad events in one’s childhood are not beyond healthy resolution decades later; however unorthodox the method. 

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

15/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Chloe Smyth who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland and Carol L. Vanzant who lives in El Centro, California, America. Both Chloe and Carol celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your special days, ladies, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Let Me Be There’. This popular song was written by John Rostill. It was first recorded by Olivia Newton-John in 1973 and included on her album of the same name. This country-influenced song was Newton-John's first Top 10 single in the U.S., peaking at Number 6. It also won her a ‘Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocalist’.

The song was also covered by many other artists including Elvis Presley (who recorded it live and sang it in many of his concerts before his death): Ike and Tina Turner (1964): Tanya Tucker (1974)  Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn (1975).

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One of the main reasons for getting married, apart from loving the other person and being their soul mate, is to put that missing piece into the jigsaw puzzle that makes up a happier and more wholesome you. Without that other person, you will never quite feel the person you were meant to feel. We each need the other half of our loving cup to fill us with contentment and satisfaction. We all want our other half to become our constant companion during our journey through life; the one who urges us on when we need that vital encouragement and an extra push to get there. They will become our best friend at our worst moments and offer us a listening ear and their support when everyone else turns away from us. With them, we will always have a shoulder to cry on whenever we need emotional support. They will become in effect, our eternal soul mate, from whom life will never part nor death separate.

And all we have to do in order to benefit from their presence is to ‘let them be there’.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 14th October 2020

14/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to Shane Shortiss who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland. Shane celebrates his birthday today. Enjoy your special day, Shane, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘Jackson’. This song was written in 1963 by Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Leiber, and was first recorded by Wheeler. It is best known from two 1967 releases: a pop hit single by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, which reached Number 14 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ and Number 39 on the ‘Easy Listening’ charts. However, it was an even bigger hit when recorded by Johnny Cash and June Carter. It reached Number two on the ‘Billboard Country Singles Chart’. 

Story: The song is about a married couple who find (according to the lyrics) that the ‘fire’ has gone out of their relationship. It relates the desire of both partners to travel to ‘Jackson’ where they each expect to be welcomed as someone far better suited to the city's lively nightlife than the other is. The ‘Jackson’ referred to in the song is thought to be Jackson, Tennessee.

The song was a big success for Johnny Cash and June Carter and their 1967 version reached the Number 2 spot on the ‘US Country Chart’, and won a ‘Grammy Award’ in 1968 for being the ‘Best Country and Western Performance Duet, Trio or Group’. This version was reprised by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, performing as Johnny Cash and June Carter, in the 2005 film, ‘Walk the Line’.

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While I spent a few years in Canada and visited several states of the U.S.A. while there during the early 1960s, I never saw Tennessee, but I did once spend a few days in the neighbouring state of Kentucky. 

I love the theme of this song, about renewing a marriage when the fire has gone out in the relationship. For several years, when I first became a Probation Officer in West Yorkshire during the early 1970s, one of the specialist roles I worked in was as a ‘Matrimonial Guidance Counsellor’. When I began in the Probation Service I was as keen as mustard to arm myself with as many skills as possible, and between 1970 and 1985, I attended many advanced training courses in a variety of specialised subjects. I had always displayed above-average intelligence in my youth but left school at the age of 15 years before taking my examinations. I came from poor family circumstances and wanted to start working so that I might have more money in my pockets, better clothes on my back, and more fashionable shoes on my feet. Although I returned to the academic field in my late twenties to obtain the educational qualifications I had failed to take as a teenager, for a good decade between the ages of 30-40 years of age, I had what can only be accurately described as an ‘educational hang-up’ as I played academic catch-up. I would read half a dozen books weekly, and I was determined to advance myself in the field of worker knowledge by attending the most advanced and prestigious of courses I could.

Each year, the ‘West Yorkshire Probation Service’ would fund various courses for staff members who wanted to acquire ‘specialist skills’. The annual ‘Matrimonial Guidance Counselling’ course was operated by the ‘Tavistock Clinic’ and was one of the most prestigious courses in the country, which the successful applicant would attend for one week every quarter throughout a two-year period. Being the most expensive course also, only one applicant per year from the whole of West Yorkshire would be selected to attend. I was that lucky applicant early in my Probation Officer career.

The Tavistock lecturers mostly dealt with Matrimonial and associated sexual matters, and the course tutors came from the highest of academic cycles and eminent professions in the country. One of the course requirements (as well as the eight full weeks practical attendance throughout a two-year training year) was to submit case records upon matrimonial clients worked with during that year that the group of entire course members would discuss.

Today’s post will not concentrate on many of the common problems experienced by men and their wives coming for counselling to improve their marital relationships or the techniques used by most matrimonial guidance workers. Instead, I want to tell you about one course member who I became close friends with over my two years membership on this course.

Her name was Margaret, and like most people who become ‘Matrimonial Guidance Counsellors’ (myself included), few of us are strangers to being in unsatisfactory marriages ourselves, which could have undoubtedly benefited from a bit of marriage guidance counselling! Margaret was just shy of thirty years of age and had got remarried to her second husband at the age of twenty-seven years. She lived in the midlands, and we would frequently chat during coffee breaks and mealtimes. The morning parts of the course would usually be listening to lectures and during the afternoons and evenings (we went on until 9:00 pm nightly) we would have role-playing sessions. These role-playing sessions would always be televised sessions in which one course member would enact the role of ‘Marriage Guidance Counsellor’ and two other course members would play the role of a married couple seeking help to improve/save their marriage.

During our many chats, Margaret told me that she had married a man whom she described as being ‘very needy’. Her husband had been in Care from infancy until his 18th year of life. He had been raised by a succession of foster parents and had spent intermittent periods in Children’s Homes in between foster home placements. He was twenty-eight years old when he married Margaret and both he and Margaret had always said they wanted to have children before they got too old.

Margaret had been previously married at the age of twenty-two years of age, but that marriage ended in separation and divorce three years later. Her first husband drank too much alcohol and would become aggressive and violent when drunk. Fortunately, they separated before any children were born to the union. 

After a few years of married life to her second husband, it had become apparent to Margaret that he also had personal problems which were adversely affecting their marriage. She described her second husband as someone who was ‘emotionally draining her’ with his constant attention-seeking behaviour and his personal insecurities. He had become ‘too needy’ and Margaret was on the verge of leaving him. Her common complaint was, despite having no children to their union (something they both wanted), Margaret was not prepared to bring children into a marriage where the husband of that marriage behaved like a child himself with his overbearing needy behaviour and emotional demands. I had been married six years at the time, and my wife was also displaying emotional and non-communicative difficulties, so I could more easily sympathise with Margaret.

Margaret told me nine months into our course, that when she started attending the Tavistock course, she was on the verge of leaving her husband but had decided to give their marriage another chance. One of the earlier course session lecturers had suggested to assembled students that most couples experiencing marital problems could benefit from a change in their usual environment and their general routine. Some couples might be advised to change their sexual approaches and responses while all couples would be advised to talk and listen to each other more. Some couples who had lost the spark in their marital relationship were advised to have a ‘dirty weekend’ away in a hotel or ‘to go on that holiday of a lifetime’. 

The lecture and advice that attracted Margaret’s attention most, was being told that often in a failing relationship, a large part of the relationship problem lay in some emotionally unresolved part of one marriage partner’s past. Until that repressed event/events and negative feelings could be faced, expressed, discussed and dealt with, nothing could help the marriage to improve substantially, however much the couple talked together, or whatever they changed in their marriage routines and practices. The lecturer indicated that the partner with the ‘unresolved problem’ of their past could not come to terms with their past until their repressed negative feelings had been expressed and emotionally resolved. 

In a roundabout manner, Margaret devised her own way of doing things that were to save her marriage. She had taken on board all the matrimonial advice and useful tips and suggestions she had garnered from the course and had applied some of them in a way that had never been originally suggested by the marital experts and lecturers. 
First, she was able to convince her husband that unless their marital relationship improved, the marriage was over. She was also able to persuade her husband to talk more ‘about his past years in Care’, as he had rarely spoken about them during their courtship and early years of marriage. During those discussions, her husband frequently became angry as he explained some of his unhappier experiences he had endured at the hands of others while being raised in Care. Having been abandoned by his mother as an infant, and never having known his father, Margaret concluded that her husband had several unresolved identity issues. Never having had a family or home of his own, made marriage to Margaret an attractive prospect for him. It also reflected a need to have his own happy family situation. He thought that marrying Margaret would provide him with the happy life and family circumstances which he had always craved, but never had. His emotional need of being with Margaret grew more and more unhealthy the longer he continued to repress his hurtful memories. Margaret said that he invariably started to respond like an emotionally demanding child, who was insecure and was constantly demanding attention. Margaret became emotionally drained with his demands and had reached the end of her tether.

Then, one weekend she got an idea. Instead of following one of the course tutor’s suggestions of going away on a weekend break or a big expensive holiday, she decided it would be more beneficial to take her husband elsewhere. She said it was extremely hard to persuade her husband, but she reminded him that he needed to do what she asked of him or their marriage would end. Her threat of divorce eventually worked. 

Between one quarter and the next (in between attending the Tavistock course), Margaret managed to get her husband to speak about the places in his life min Care where he was very unhappy or most cruelly treated. Then, they would travel to each one, and when they got there, they would sit in the car outside the location. They would never go in. Margaret would then ask her husband to relate the precise nature of the unhappy times he had spent there, and she encouraged him to recall his most painful memories. 

During these visits (she said there were around two dozen in all, spread around the country), her husband would cry as he emotionally released a dam of repressed feeling which he had held in his body for over two decades. By visiting all the places where he had thought he’d left his unhappy memories, he was able to cry out the hurt he had repressed deep down for so long. Only after many tears and much more discussion of his bad feelings was he ‘emotionally free’ to be strong enough to seek out his Social Work file from the ‘Social Services Department’ and read about the circumstance which had led his mother to initially place him in Care. While learning more about his mother’s past did not lead him to ever want to seek her out, the fact that ‘he knew’ seemed to lessen the hurt he had felt and harboured all of his life. 

Although Margaret and her husband were still in the early stages of a much improved marital relationship when the Tavistock course ended, and I had no farther contact with Margaret, I will never forget the way she rearranged the information of the marital experts in a manner that resolved her husband’s emotional blockage. 

Even if at the end of the process, the couple eventually decided to end their marriage, Margaret had helped her emotionally repressed husband to become less emotionally demanding in his future relationships without ever needing to go to Jackson with him!

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

13/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my son Adam’s fiancée, Aimee Thomas. Aimee celebrates her birthday today. Enjoy your special day, Aimee, and I enclose a song to congratulate you on your engagement to Adam as well as to wish you the happiest of birthdays.

My song today is ‘Marry Me’. Not to be confused with another different song with the same title by  Jason Derulo in 2013, the song that I sing today was recorded by Neil Diamond and Buffey Lawson and came from the album ‘Tennessee Moon’ (1996).

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Becoming formally engaged to be married today still plays an important part in the process of declaring one’s private and public commitment for another person they love. 

In my day, becoming engaged conveyed several important messages to society at large. It told all other potential suitors, ‘Hands off, she’s/he’s already betrothed to another”. It said to society at large, “I pledge to marry my fiancée” and failure to do so by unilaterally breaking off the engagement, invoked ‘Breach of Contract’ proceedings in the courts, which invariably led to financial compensation being awarded to the injured party.

With half of all marriages ending in divorce today, commitment at the engagement stage (although vital) is unfortunately never enough in its own right. However, when a marriage works out (and in half of all cases it still does), and the couple happily negotiates life together, it is well worth it. Finding one’s other half not only makes one feel whole, but it adds a new purpose and dimension to one’s life and provides a level of personal satisfaction that no other relationship can bring.

Unfortunately, there are too many people getting married today who are seeking a ‘quick fix’, but such love addicts are doomed to failure.  They may have just left one unsatisfactory relationship and are jumping into another before old scars have had time to properly heal. They may still be living in the parental abode and view getting married as a means of ‘getting out and getting on’ with their lives. Such people are avoiding ‘unfinished business’ and often finish up being the type of husband or wife who wants to change their partner to their way of thinking as soon as they get back from their honeymoon. From the moment your husband or wife shows signs that they want to change the person they walked down the aisle with, they are no longer the man or woman who you married. You have now stopped being their husband or wife; you have become a project, a sort of progress in the 

My previous record in the marriage stakes prior to meeting my Sheila ten years ago and marrying her on my 70th birthday in November 2012 is certainly nothing to write home about. I was unfortunately in that half section of society whose marriage experience didn’t last the course! At best, I could have been described as an outright ‘loser’ in my first marriage, and when my second wife of 28 years also indicated she wanted to separate after the children had grown up and had flown the family nest, for a few years afterward, I considered myself as being an ‘also ran’ in those marriage stakes also. Then, out of the blue, one cold December afternoon in 2010 while walking up Main Street in Haworth, I met Sheila, and for the first time in a long time, I started to feel like ‘a winner’ again.

And that is how true love can make any runner in the romantic field feel, ‘like a winner’. To meet a loving person, and to know that even after they discover your character flaws and weaknesses, they still love you and want to marry you, is to experience all of your Christmases and birthdays rolled into one. In a single magical moment, one is given a glimpse of the happiness to come. I remember the first time I heard Sheila tell me, “I love you”. It was such a good sound to my ears, I felt that I was floating on cloud nine. I instantly pretended not to hear Sheila profess her love for me, just so that she would repeat the sentence, which she did. Her sincerity humbled me, and instead of responding in my usual arrogant way by replying, “Of course you do, sweetheart, what’s not to love about me?”, I immediately slipped into an intimacy with the new love of my life from which I have never recovered. 

Over the following week, before we met up again in Haworth, I could not stop thinking about her. Sheila disturbed my regular sleeping pattern because once I began to realise the reality that what lay in store for me was far better than what I could ever find in any romantic dream, I preferred to stay awake with my beautiful thoughts than go to sleep.

Aimee, what can I truly tell you about my son, Adam?  Anyone who knows me well knows I am not the type of man who tells untruths, whatever the circumstance or consequences. Like all men, Adam has his strengths and faults, and without identifying either (as that is what marriage will lead you to discover), I can honestly say that he has more character strengths than he has faults and that there is far more to like about him than dislike. I can also reliably say that being a ‘Forde’, if you can handle him at his worst, then you will most certainly be able to enjoy him at his best. As I have always believed, Aimee, “Marriage works best when both man and wife row the same boat and sing from the same song sheet”. That is why one of my favourite quotes by Oscar Wilde is,  “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”

So, Aimee, Sheila and I congratulate you and Adam on your recent engagement. We also wish you a happy birthday. Enjoy your special day. Bill and Sheila xx

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 12th October 2020

12/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my great-nephew, Liam Forde, who is the son of my nephew David Forde and Liam’s mother, Alison Forde. Liam lives in the Cleckheaton area of West Yorkshire. I also dedicate today’s song to Enda O'Driscoll who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. Finally, I dedicate my song today to Fay Bailey who lives in Ocala, Florida, America. Liam, Enda, and Fay all celebrate their birthday today. Enjoy your special day folks.

My song today is ‘I’ll Be There’. This song was written by Barry Gordy, Hal Davis, Bob West, and Willie Hutch. It was recorded by ‘The Jackson 5’ in August 1970. “I'll Be There" is also notable as the most successful single released by Motown during its ‘Detroit era’ (1959–72).

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The most defining characteristic of any friend, workmate, lover, partner, spouse, soulmate, or family member is someone who will ‘be there for you’ in times of need.
During the late 1960s, I gave up my job as a mill manager after deciding that I wanted to change my career and become a Probation Officer. In order to acquire a place on a ‘Probation Training Course’ at university, I returned to night school over a three-year period to obtain the ‘A-Level’ and ‘O-Level’ examinations I failed to take during my earlier years. I entered the ‘Huddersfield Probation Office’ as its newest member of staff in 1971. I was a thirty-year-old married man full of zest, and who was determined to change the world for the better by helping all of my clients to change their criminal, unhealthy or inappropriate behaviour patterns which had been blighting their lives, making them unhappy, and forever getting them into trouble.

During my first year as a rooky Probation Officer in Huddersfield, it soon became apparent to me that my training as a Probation Officer had left me ill-equipped to help the people who I was supposed to help.  The extent of the range of problems my Probation clients displayed often had very little to do with ‘criminality’ per se and had more to do with poverty of circumstances, unsatisfactory accommodation and living conditions, unhappy relationships, lack of self-confidence and self-belief, addiction and substance abuse, unhappy childhoods, poor communication, an absence of social skills, and either aggressive and violent response patterns, or non-assertive response patterns.

Another problem I faced was the sheer volume of work Probation Officers were expected to do within any working week. In many ways, the Probation Officers of the 1970s performed a range of roles that no Probation Officer of 2020 either could or would be expected to perform; even if they possessed the know-how and skills required. In 1970, a Probation Officer needed to be both Jack and Master of all trades as they carried out the roles of befriender, adviser, prison visitor, court server, report writer, matrimonial guidance counsellor; psychological counsellor, and most importantly, someone who could stop the offender committing crimes! Today, these roles (where they still exist) are ‘specialist roles’ which the officer works in, to the exclusion of all the other roles.

It had long been recognised by prison reformers (even before the turn of the 20th century), that many ex-prisoners face severe problems and are at particularly high risk of re-offending when they leave prison. Over the last century, the Probation Officer essentially evolved from that of being a volunteer prison visitor enacting a ‘befriending role’ to the Probation Officer of today, who is a paid professional enforcement officer for public protection. A range of interventions has been tried over the years to reduce the risk of prisoner reoffending, from 20th-century religious missions at the prison gate to one of supervision in the community under licence. One of the oldest traditions is that of ‘voluntary after-care’, whereby supervision, advice, or practical assistance with resettlement are provided at the request of prisoners.  

The Probation service has been formally responsible for the provision of voluntary after-care since the mid-1960s, but in recent years the numbers of offenders assisted in this way have declined dramatically. Indeed, in some areas the practice has been explicitly discontinued. Today, much of the work done by Probation Officers takes the form of being Parole Officers protecting the public by keeping contact with statutory licensees released from prison. Probation Officers also serve the Courts by preparing reports upon individuals appearing before it for offences committed. Their reports assist the court to arrive at the most appropriate sentence in respect of the offence committed and the person who committed it. Probation Officers also operate group community programmes as a substitute for a custodial sentence. Since the early 1990s, there has been a general shift in probation priorities and resources away from activities with a ‘welfare’ focus towards the enforcement of statutory requirements and work more directly geared to crime prevention and public protection.

During my first year as a rooky Probation Officer, I realised that there was simply no way that it was possible to see every probation client on my books through weekly office appointments and home visits. I would have around fifty probation clients to supervise, and unless they were to become no more than ‘tick clients’ (someone who fulfilled their statutory commitment by simply showing their face in the office for less than five minutes weekly and answering a few cursory questions which I could statutorily make a record of), it was impossible to actually get to know anyone and establish any workable client /officer relationship, let alone significantly help them!

So, very early on in my career, I decided to break the conventional mold of client reporting, and instead of having my clients report to me weekly, I would see them briefly each week ‘for the first month only’, and after that, they would be asked to report to me monthly when we could spend at least half an hour together in meaningful discussion and engagement.  I also started to build an army of Probation Volunteers around my caseload to assist me in my work. These were unpaid private citizens who each had something personally to offer. One Probation Volunteer might have numerous job contacts and be more able to get some unemployed Probation client of mine a suitable job quicker than any job centre could (especially when the unemployed person had a criminal record). Another volunteer could have many landlord friends who rented out private flats and who might be persuaded to rent one out to a single man being released from prison. Another might have a sports or activity-based interest like hiking, boxing, chess, dancing, painting, camping, cycling, mountain walking, rock climbing, etc. Some would be ideal listeners. I would match my volunteers up with suitable clients on my caseload; not only to provide them with an added interest to occupy their leisure time ‘legally’, but to increase their confidence levels, and to give them a taste of accomplishing something. Failure to accomplish was too regular a pattern in many of their lives. 

Within one year, I had found a way of helping clients in a way they considered to be personally beneficial. I was the first probation officer in West Yorkshire to employ these methods to free up much of my time (which had previously been spent chasing my tail like a dog and never catching it). Freeing up time enabled me to have longer and more meaningful face-to-face interviews with my clients, whereby I could now give them the amount of time they needed in the interview instead of ‘watching the clock’. In short, through using many Probation Volunteers, I was able to delegate tasks and manage my workload more efficiently and satisfactory. 

It was during these days in 1972/73 when I stopped wearing a wristwatch. I have never worn one since. Early on, I involved the Probation volunteers I used in regular case discussions as well as reviewing their own designated roles. This made them feel more involved with the client, which all appreciated. Like many a teaching assistant in the classroom (who often hopes to become a teacher themselves in the future), many a probation volunteer helper used their experience working alongside me with my clients to advance their chances of being accepted onto a future training course at university to become a Probation Officer. I was the first ‘Probation Volunteer Co-ordinator’ in the whole of Yorkshire, and I eventually would run regular training courses for the thirty-plus probation volunteers who worked with at least one of my statutory or voluntary clients. By being prepared to organise, manage and train a stable of voluntary helpers, I was eventually able to free myself up to do other work which helped the client change their inappropriate behaviour patterns and to increase my likelihood of ‘being there for them’ when they needed me most.

I also decided early on in my professional career to have my working methods independently evaluated and I was also the first Probation Officer in the country to research client outcomes and have my research independently evaluated by non-Probation professional sources. By this time, I was seeing half of my client group within one combined two-hour weekly group session where I would instruct them in Relaxation Training and stress reduction methods. My group courses were also geared toward them acquiring assertive behaviour and improving their social skill range, besides increasing their control in areas of anger management and fear reduction. This work proved enormously successful, and it was extensively reported on in European Social Work journals during the 1980s. 

Because my working methods treated statutory Probation clients the same non-criminal group clients and defined their problems as being related to stress, fear, anger, self-confidence, non-assertion, depression, medication addiction, history of being abused, etc, instead of viewing them as being a ‘criminal in need of reform’, it worked with over 85 percent of group members for two decades. This fact was confirmed by a ‘10-year follow-up study’ on hundreds of Probation Clients I had put through a six-month group programme between 1973 and 1993. Over 40 group clients in the study group which was independently evaluated had over thirty previous convictions each, and half a dozen group member clients each had over one hundred prior convictions. The offences ranged between theft, assault, shoplifting, criminal damage, affray, arson, indecent exposure, and indecent assault. My 85 percent non-reconviction rate compared highly favourably with National Probation Service statistics that showed non-conviction rates to be less than 30 percent. Also, my survey was after a 10-year follow-up period from my initial contact with the offender and not the usual 2-year follow-up research period used by National Statistics. My group programmes involved negligible costs to operate apart from Probation Officer time, whereas other non-custodial community programme options at the time cost hundreds of pounds, per client, per week.

I would always complete a group programme, or a period of statutory contact with every client I ever worked with by giving them a questionnaire to complete. I would require them to provide consumer feedback to the quality and type of service they had ‘expected’ and the quality of service they considered they had ‘received’. There was also a section in my questionnaire which requested ‘suggested improvements’. This latter section requesting suggestions for service improvement revealed one very enlightening aspect that regularly appeared in most of the feedback questionnaires; and which fortunately I had started operating ten years before I received the combined feedback.

One question asked , ‘How often do you feel that you really needed to see your probation Officer during the length of your Probation Supervision or Prison Licence?” and they were offered the following categories of response: Once a week: Every two weeks: Once a month: Bi-monthly: Quarterly: Other:

Now, when a Probationer is placed on Probation, they often found themselves in the world of ‘Hobson’s Choice’. The sentencing court might have offered them the opportunity of being made the subject of a Probation Order or having a prison sentence imposed. Thus, the overwhelming number of Probation Order client’s reporting to a Probation Officer did not want to be sitting in their office but felt they had no real choice in the matter. My questionnaire revealed that there were around three or four occasions in a two-year Probation Order period when the client could ideally benefit from receiving Probation Officers advice, their help, or merely lending an ear while they let off steam. The questionnaire also revealed that the most significant experience that the client best remembered about their Probation Officer, was not how often or how little they saw them, but ‘were they available when they really wanted help on the three or four occasions during their period of statutory supervision?’ 

The nature of any Probation Officer’s workload involves dealing with regular emergencies that crop up daily. Such emergencies would involve the Probation Officer concerned dropping everything else planned because of the need to rearrange their day at the last moment. When the Probation Officer’s clients reported to the office that day (usually reluctantly), they would be told by the receptionist that their usual officer was unavailable, and they would be referred to see another Probation Officer instead. Whenever that happened, while it would not normally have mattered (because the client did not want be reporting anyway), sod’s law decreed that ‘today’ was one of those rare occasions during their statutory period of contact, when the probation client wanted to see their Probation Officer, but their Probation Officer was not there to help them! My questionnaire revealed that this was the most remembered experience when it came to assessing the quality of the service they had received! Clients did not remember the previous forty consecutive weeks you may have been there to see them(when they did not want to see and would have preferred to have been doing something else). The experience they remembered was the one time they really wanted and needed to see you, and ‘you were not there!’ 

Whenever I hear the song I sing today, it is this lesson in life I vividly recall.  Never tell anyone with a conviction, “I’ll be there’ if there is any possibility that you will not be. And that is why the best of friends, workmates, lovers, partners, spouses, soulmates, or family members (and PROBATION OFFICERS) is someone who will ‘be there for you’ in times of need.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 11th October 2020

11/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to four people who celebrate their birthday today. First, we wish a happy birthday to Jillian Wheaton who lives in County Waterford, Ireland. Our second birthday celebrant is Barry Walsh who comes from Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary, Ireland originally, but who now lives in Brussels, Belgium. Next is Bridget Tobin who lives in County Tipperary, Ireland. Finally, we wish a happy birthday to Cindy Sonday who lives in East Lansing, Michigan, America. Enjoy your birthday, Jillian, Barry, Bridget, and Cindy, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.

My song today is ‘I Walk the Line’. This song was written and recorded in 1956 by Johnny Cash. After three attempts with moderate chart ratings, it became Cash's first Number 1 hit on the Billboard charts. It reached Number 17 on the US pop charts

The song's lyrics refer to marital fidelity, personal responsibility, and avoiding temptation and criminal behaviour. 

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The message of my song today refers to marital fidelity, personal responsibility, avoiding temptation and criminal behaviour. All four of these aspects of life have both affected mine in some measure.

Like many men and women, I have not always been faithful in my past but whenever I have erred, the person I have lied to and cheated the most has been myself! My twenty-seven years working as a Probation Officer brought me into direct contact with many people from broken marriages, especially couples where the man had offended and was subsequently sentenced to imprisonment for his crime. 

Then, there were many occasions where the only crime involved in the break-up of the relationship had been the unwillingness to take ultimate responsibility for one’s own wrongful actions. Whereas Oscar Wilde remarked that the only thing he could not resist was temptation itself, I think that William Shakespeare was nearer the mark in his play, ‘Julia Caesar’ when his  Roman nobleman character, Cassius said to his friend, Brutus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” 
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I believe that temptation will always exist in one form or another every day of our lives, whether it involves resisting eating that second chocolate biscuit, or having that extra drink in the pub before we call it a day, or inappropriately responding to the sexual advances of an ardent admirer you have always secretly fancied. More important, however, whenever we are called upon to resist temptation, is the responsibility every individual owes themselves. I believe that the day we truly grow up is the day we are prepared to take personal responsibility for our own attitudes displayed, our own beliefs held, and our own actions committed. Until we learn to stand in our own shoes, we will never be able to walk in them with pride and dignity. In short, we will never be able to ‘walk the line’.

In my lifetime’s work as a probation officer in West Yorkshire, I never failed to tell the members of every group programme that I ran that if they could love themselves inwardly, they would not need others to love them outwardly.

I also worked with many people who had either been unfaithful to a partner or was in a marriage or long-term relationship where their partner had been unfaithful to them. In almost every case, when the infidelity had been well and truly exposed, the person who had been cheated on indicated they had long suspected it might have been happening but did not want to believe it. I witnessed similar denial by several mothers whose sons and daughters were being sexually abused by their father or stepfather, and although the child’s mother suspected such might have been happening, they never confronted their worst fears and challenged the perpetrator. Even when there is no more denying the reality of the situation, the hurt can still take a long time to heal, along with the re-investment of trust by the person who feels betrayed. 

It is sad but true that sometimes your heart needs more time to accept what your mind already knows. ‘Infidelity’ is best countered in one’s response pattern by being more aware of the behaviours we are more likely to act upon. If we know our dangers, we can better control and counter them. Feelings are much like waves; we cannot stop them from coming, but we can choose which ones to surf. Being a passionate person in everything I ever undertook, I knew that I could remain in control and maintain a sound footing for my actions by knowing my most dangerous character traits and personal weaknesses. I knew that if I could keep a check on my passions, I would not finish up being punished for them.

Being aware of the wrong which one might do does not require looking into a crystal ball or being able to foretell the future. It does, however, require you honestly recognising and acknowledging your mistakes whenever you make them, and doing whatever is required to learn from them so they are not repeated. 

Therefore, being able to strike a balance between the heart and the head is essential to one’s emotional sense of wellbeing and sound judgement. The marital illusion of experiencing superficial happiness with another serves no other purpose than ‘living a lie’. The actions of married men and women who have extra-marital affairs are clouded with self-delusion and denial. Such self-deception merely blurs their focus and perspective. It enables a romantic physical and emotional attachment to provide a veil of concealment until the truth is eventually exposed and is confronted by them.

Good and regular communication between a man and his wife is the best barrier to infidelity ever happening. When communicating with each other stops, the lying starts and the temptation to stray and cheat upon one’s partner grows with the level of dissatisfaction felt. Of all the lies told between an unfaithful spouse and their partner, the cruellest of them all is found in the uneasy silence; the unspoken thoughts of unfaithful cover-ups and things left unsaid.

I will end today's serious post on a lighter note. As a lifelong Behaviourist, I believe that people often learn their worst traits from those who have treated them the worse. Consequently, I genuinely believe that infidelity in a woman is a masculine trait……….. or should that be the other way around?

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 10th October 2020

10/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to all of those people who find themselves unemployed because of the recent downturn in the country’s economy, or indeed, any other reason. It is a sad but harsh truth that the world has always been divided between those who ‘have’ and ‘have not’, and the division of injustice is no more evident than in the area of a person’s employment or lack of it. That work is important in human life is obvious. Any effort to achieve any form of development without it must necessarily encounter a hitch. Through their work, mankind is enabled to resolve problems of survival and leisure. Work is for most people the ordinary means for the provision of their own and their families' sustenance, and yet having or not having gainful employment affects our health, hope, and happiness levels. Dependent upon having a job is also attached to one’s level of self-respect, pride, purpose, and self-image; and whether we like it or not, the opinion which others have of you have always been influenced by the nature of one’s work. I still recall the old saying, ‘By one’s work is one known’.  

My song today is ‘Nine to Five’. This song was written and originally performed by American country music entertainer, Dolly Parton, for the 1980 comedy film of the same name. The song was released as a single in November 1980.

The song garnered Dolly Parton an ‘Academic Award’ nomination and four ‘Grammy Award’ nominations, winning her the awards for ‘Best Country Song’ and ‘Best Country Vocal Performance, Female’. For a time, the song became something of an anthem for office workers in the U.S., and in 2004.
 
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During my life, I have never had a ‘9 to 5’ job. The closest I ever came to working an eight-hour day was my very first mill job in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire. I was 15 years old, and the hours of my employment were 8:15 am to 4:15 pm. The early finish in the afternoon suited me as I would walk the two-mile journey home from my work, to save on bus fare. 

My next job was in a West Yorkshire dyeworks in Liversedge, West Yorkshire, and witnessed me working a ten-hour day, Monday-Friday, plus Saturday mornings. I remained in this job until I emigrated to Canada at the age of 21 years.

I worked irregular hours in a Montreal Club as a professional singer, seven nights a week when I first lived in Canada. I would not start my evening work until 10:00 pm and would not end my shift before 2:OO am. Three club singers would alternate our twenty-minute singing spots and appear once hourly between 10:00pm and 2:00am. I gave up my singing career after a few months and took a job on the railway. 

When I worked on the ‘Canadian Pacific Railway’, I served the train customers with food and refreshments, but the long-distance journeys enabled me to see the beautiful wild wilderness across Canada between Montreal and Winnipeg (approximately 2000 miles) at no travel cost. With a 12-hour rest period between the return on long journeys, I was able to get a taste of lots of places I would not otherwise have ever seen in the daylight. My hours of work any day on these long journeys would be 4 hours working, followed by 4 hours rest, followed by 4 hours working, followed by 4 hours rest, etc.

My last job in Canada was working in a hotel on the night shifts. When I returned to England, I worked ten-hour days as a textile foreman. I then worked as a mill manager on nights before training to enter the Probation Service as a probation officer. 

I spent the last twenty-six years of my working life as a probation officer, prior to my early retirement (on the grounds of disability). During this period I still worked irregular hours and my wife and family would never know what time at the end of my day I might return home. There were days when I would work between 9-00 am and might not arrive home until 10:00 pm. I would work so long some days that I would take half of the next day off (in lieu) before going in at lunchtime. I do not think that I ever worked less than 60 hours in any week during my years in the West Yorkshire Probation Service. There were some Saturday mornings I would be required to work in the courts, and some weekends when I would give talks to different community organisations.

There was many a time when I wished I had a 9 to 5 job! How much easier my life could have been.

Even if one is fortunate enough to have a job today that pays you an average wage level, life is still hard for most workforces. Whatever employment most people are engaged in, the bottom line is that with the passing of each year, workers are expected to work more within the same allocation of time for less reward. There are so many people today who are in highly stressful jobs; and the fact that they have a job at all, any job, makes them one of the lucky ones. 

I wonder when we get to our retirement and old age one day, will we think back to our earlier life and ask ourselves, “Was the stress and the pressure I endured worth it?” While we may have occupied well-paid, salary positions of employment that appear enviable to so many low-paid workers on zero contracts, and unemployed people, will we consider ourselves to have paid a too high price for the financial security our job offered? Most people who have always held down a job will have worked irregular hours, and all will have missed vital time and family occasions because of work commitments. We will have probably missed out on some experiences we can never recapture; occasions which can never be revisited like attending school assemblies and school sports days or reading bedtime stories with our children when they were young. 

When we recollect the loyally and time we devoted to our employers at the expense of ‘quality time’ we missed spending with our partners and children, shall we conclude that it was worth it? 

Often, when I have heard people complain about the pressures of their work, I have thought that they would have been far better lowering their standard of living and taking an easier job, especially if working in a ‘9 to 5’ job also lowered their stress levels. I have often thought that they would have got far more pleasure and satisfaction out of reading their young children a bedtime story, than perusing their bumper salary slip at the end of the month. I know that they would have been able to spend more time in their homes with their loved ones than still making that tired journey home at the end of a long day. Perhaps they might even have enjoyed a happier marriage more of the time?

If you had your time to live all over again, would you consider a 9 to 5 job a bad deal? Ask anyone today who is unable to get a job of any description and I’ll bet they will jump at the chance of obtaining such a job! 

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 9th October 2020

9/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to four people who celebrate their birthday (one heavenly birthday and three earthly birthdays).
The first person I remember today is my dear deceased mother-in-law, Elizabeth, who died in May 2017. It is Mother Elizabeth’s 92nd heavenly birthday today. Never forgotten and eternally loved, Mother Elizabeth, may the smile you always wore never leave your face. Your face was always friendly and radiated happiness, and your talk was always happy. All our memories of you are happy ones. Your presence on this earth is sadly missed by family and friends. Love Bill and Sheila.

The other three people who also celebrate their birthday today are Clare Davies who lives in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, and is a lifelong friend to my daughter Rebecca and the Forde family. Also, I wish happy birthday to Debbie Torpey and Shane Finn, both of whom celebrate their birthday today. Debbie and Shane live in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary. Enjoy your special day. 

My song today is ‘Happy Talk’. This song was from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical ‘South Pacific’. The song is sung by the character ‘Bloody Mary’ to the American lieutenant, Joe Cable, about having a happy life, after he begins romancing her daughter Liat.

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I recall one home that I frequently visited in the 1980s in Holmfirth, Huddersfield when I worked as a Probation Officer. In the house lived a mother and her three children aged 5, 7, and 11 years old. She had never married the father of her children, and the couple separated one year after her youngest child had been born. The children’s father had started a relationship with another woman and moved up to Tyneside with his new partner and maintained no contact with the mother of his three children or any of his offspring.

The children’s mother had been made the subject of a I-year Probation Order by the local Magistrate’s Court after an altercation with one of her neighbours had resulted in the other woman being assaulted. The argument was over something of nothing.  Apparently, her 11-year-old son had been playing football on the street and had gone into his neighbour’s front garden without permission to retrieve a football he and some other boys had been kicking about. Whilst in his neighbour’s garden, he inadvertently trampled on some of the flowers. The neighbour saw the boy and started giving him an earful about unlawful trespass. 

During the boy's verbal scolding, the neighbour made some uncharitable reference to the boy having no father in his life to keep him in check. The boy’s mother heard her angry neighbour berating her son and started giving her a bit of her own verbal abuse back. A slanging match between the two angry women commenced and as insults were flung backwards and forward, the boy’s mother lost her temper after her angry neighbour shouted, ‘No wonder, your old man ran off with a younger woman! Who would put up with that mouth on you?”

My client had heard enough, and when she could not persuade her argumentative neighbour to ‘back off’, she lost it and threw a pan which she had been holding at her, hitting her in the face with the missile. Her neighbour called the local police, and my client was charged with assault and a breach of the peace and subsequently produced before the ‘Huddersfield Magistrate’s Court’. I prepared a report for the sentencing court and could see at the interviewing stage that the mother of three had a lot on her plate and deserved support and sympathy more than punishment for her offence. I recommended a short period of Probation Order supervision.

My client had a part-time job which she attended every morning after walking her children to school. She would then have to hurry back home in the early afternoon to get ready to pick her children up again at the end of their school day. Because of her limited time and motherly responsibilities, I decided that our obligatory contact would be made via my home visits in the early evening around 6:00 pm every fortnight.

During my visits, it soon became apparent that it was her 11-year-old son who gave her the most worry. As regarding her youngest child, her 5-year-old daughter, this little girl was one of the happiest children one could come across. I can still remember her mother contrasting and comparing the youngest and oldest of her three children when she first introduced the three of them to me. She indicated that her 11-year-old son was constantly angry for no apparent reason these days while all she ever heard from the mouth of her youngest daughter was ‘happy talk’. 

This young girl merely reaffirmed a long-held view of mine that happiness depends more on the inward disposition of mind than on outward circumstances. I have always thought that most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be. So, when you wake up tomorrow morning, make the first thought that comes into your head a happy one and the first words you will speak when you go downstairs will be ‘happy talk’.

Love and peace Bill xxx
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Song For Today: 8th October 2020

8/10/2020

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I dedicate my song today to my aunt, Kathleen Fanning who lives in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire. It is my Aunt Kathleen’s birthday today. Aunt Kathleen lost her husband not too long ago and she has also been losing her memory over the past two years. She still manages to live in her own house with the support of her sons who arrange things on her behalf and keep an eye on her. Her son, Nigel Fanning, and his wife who live in Australia are presently visiting her. Enjoy your day, Aunt Kathleen. Love Billy and Sheila xxx

My song today is the favourite song of her late husband (Uncle Tom). Like all three of my late mother’s brothers, Uncle Tom lived in the Forde household in West Yorkshire for a few years when he moved across from his homeland of Ireland to seek a more prosperous life in England. Uncle Tom was always a good singer and I grew up hearing him sing the same song every day. That song was ‘When I Fall in Love’. 

When Uncle Tom met Kathleen, he wooed her, wed her, and took her home to their matrimonial abode in Cleckheaton. The couple would frequent their local Working Men’s Club every Saturday night, where Uncle Tom would often be coaxed to get up and sing a song. The number he sang was always the same song; the song he sang regularly to his Kathleen, ‘When I Fall in Love’.

My song today is ‘When I Fall in Love’. This was a popular song that was written by Victor Young (music) and Edward Heyman (lyrics). It was introduced in the film, ‘One Minute to Zero’ and Jeri Southern sang on the first recording released in April 1952. The song has become a standard, with many artists recording it over the years but is mostly associated with Nat King Cole, whose recording reached Number 2 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’ in 1957.

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Have a smashing day, Aunt Kathleen, and enjoy the company of your two sons and their family. I will never hear ‘When I Fall in Love’ without bringing both you and Uncle Tom to mind. Love from your nephew, Billy Forde and Sheila xx

Love and peace Bill xxx
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