Thought for today:
"Once I feared horses until I discovered that the only way to manage my fear was to learn to ride them. And once I learned that I'd been born in the 'Chinese Year of the Horse', I became determined to conquer this fear.
I have feared many things in my life, but fortunately, I have been able to face my fears and eventually manage them. Indeed, I worked with groups for over thirty years, showing hundreds of people how to best deal with fears levels that had ruined their lives and destroyed all opportunity of them socially mixing.
There are so many fears in any person's life that it would take a lifetime to itemise them all. Some are 'rational' and are more easily dealt with, while most are 'Irrational' and require specific techniques being practised such as Systematic Desensitisation, Relaxation Training, and Breathing and Mind control to deal with.
For the purpose of today's post, I mention the earliest fear I can recall. It was a fear that stayed with me all through my childhood and into adult life. Indeed, I would retain my earliest fear until I was almost 60-years-old, but it produced its greatest level of anxiety and daily disruption for me during the years of my first marriage.
My earliest fear was being in debt. During the first 21 years of my life, I saw my mother, who had seven children, pay for this week's family food with next week's wages. Mum lived on tick until all her children had grown up and had started to earn enough to feed and clothe themselves.
When I initially got married, I swore that I would never go into debt. Despite being better off than the average couple and having three times the average monies coming into the house weekly (I was a mill manager and my wife was a teacher), I still couldn't dispel that fearful cloud of debt which had become so familiar a sight in my development. I soon learned that the more you earn the more you spent, and by God my wife certainly knew how to spend! These were the late 1960s when the aspiration of all successful people involved 'Keeping up with the Joneses. It was also the time when the Bank Manager would personally send you a letter informing you when your account went in the red by sixpence or more, and then had the brass nerve to charge another seven shillings and sixpence to your overdrawn account for having written the letter!
I started to fear that I still hadn't escaped from this vicious cycle of debt, and I started to think of ways of dealing with the problem. I knew that my mother had no choice in her decision to get into debt, as my mining father earned less weekly wage than it cost to feed a wife and seven children on bread and jam for breakfast and potatoes for dinner. Her choice was the easiest one of her life to make; to get into debt or to see her children starve!
Two things worthy of mention here, before the 'Equality and Equal Right's Brigade' come down on me like at ton of bricks. The decision to accrue debt was mum's and not dad's. That was simply the way things were done in those days. Each house only had one parent worker outside it to bring in a regular wage, and that was dad. Mum looked after her large family, cooked, cleaned, washed, darned, ironed etc, as well as looking after all household monies and its management. She couldn't control how much dad earned and neither could he, as he worked all the overtime he could get, plus Saturday mornings. He would also volunteer to work during his two week's annual holiday period. The only decision mum had to make was, did the family go into debt or did she watch us starve?
Dad was the breadwinner. He earned the money and gave it to mum to do with it what she decided was best for the family. It was mum's job to 'magic it' and spend it! Mum always needed to make economies wherever possible. That usually meant that her children and husband had one meal a day while she did without!
Sociology students please note that in the 1960s, and dating back many centuries, the main meal of the day was the 'dinner', which my family ate at noon, not evening. It would seem that whether you ate dinner at noon or in the evening determined one of the main differences that distinguished the working classes from their 'betters'; the middle and upper classes!
With regard to looking for household economies, there were no places that mum could cut back her expenses; we already got maximum use from the second-hand clothes she bought us at jumble sales for us to wear daily and to put back on our bed at night time to keep us warm as we slept. Come to think of it now, mum probably was a better manager of finance than the best Chancellor this country ever had.
So my mum did what she thought necessary for the family to survive: the same thing every other mum in our situation did at the time: she made friends with the rent man, the tally man and the local grocer, Harry Hodgeson, and she kept on their good side for the next twenty years.
Whereas debt was the 'Hobson's Choice' my mum made when we were growing up, all debt accrued during my first marriage was to provide a lifestyle way above our means, just to keep up with the 'Jones'.
Eventually, I decided to take a leaf out of mum's book to address the problem as my wife showed no sign of not spending what we didn't have in the future. So I did a 'Tommy Cooper' and turned the bank manager from 'acquaintance' into 'friend'. This became relatively easy as we attended the same church and we started having a coffee together after Sunday Mass.Those overdrawn letters from my bank manager stopped once we became the closest of buddies. He even gave me a £2000 overdraft facility (which was virtually unknown in 1970), without me asking for one, just to avoid further difficulties after he retired and a new bank manager was installed at the Cleckheaton branch.
After many years of accumulating debt, I got rid of the debt essentially by getting rid of my wife. There are many ways of dealing effectively with high fear levels today that were not available to my mother in her day, but I must admit that the way she managed to live with her fear of debt did provide me with a way to manage debt during my first marriage, by becoming pally with the bank manager!" William Forde: January 14th, 2018.
"Once I feared horses until I discovered that the only way to manage my fear was to learn to ride them. And once I learned that I'd been born in the 'Chinese Year of the Horse', I became determined to conquer this fear.
I have feared many things in my life, but fortunately, I have been able to face my fears and eventually manage them. Indeed, I worked with groups for over thirty years, showing hundreds of people how to best deal with fears levels that had ruined their lives and destroyed all opportunity of them socially mixing.
There are so many fears in any person's life that it would take a lifetime to itemise them all. Some are 'rational' and are more easily dealt with, while most are 'Irrational' and require specific techniques being practised such as Systematic Desensitisation, Relaxation Training, and Breathing and Mind control to deal with.
For the purpose of today's post, I mention the earliest fear I can recall. It was a fear that stayed with me all through my childhood and into adult life. Indeed, I would retain my earliest fear until I was almost 60-years-old, but it produced its greatest level of anxiety and daily disruption for me during the years of my first marriage.
My earliest fear was being in debt. During the first 21 years of my life, I saw my mother, who had seven children, pay for this week's family food with next week's wages. Mum lived on tick until all her children had grown up and had started to earn enough to feed and clothe themselves.
When I initially got married, I swore that I would never go into debt. Despite being better off than the average couple and having three times the average monies coming into the house weekly (I was a mill manager and my wife was a teacher), I still couldn't dispel that fearful cloud of debt which had become so familiar a sight in my development. I soon learned that the more you earn the more you spent, and by God my wife certainly knew how to spend! These were the late 1960s when the aspiration of all successful people involved 'Keeping up with the Joneses. It was also the time when the Bank Manager would personally send you a letter informing you when your account went in the red by sixpence or more, and then had the brass nerve to charge another seven shillings and sixpence to your overdrawn account for having written the letter!
I started to fear that I still hadn't escaped from this vicious cycle of debt, and I started to think of ways of dealing with the problem. I knew that my mother had no choice in her decision to get into debt, as my mining father earned less weekly wage than it cost to feed a wife and seven children on bread and jam for breakfast and potatoes for dinner. Her choice was the easiest one of her life to make; to get into debt or to see her children starve!
Two things worthy of mention here, before the 'Equality and Equal Right's Brigade' come down on me like at ton of bricks. The decision to accrue debt was mum's and not dad's. That was simply the way things were done in those days. Each house only had one parent worker outside it to bring in a regular wage, and that was dad. Mum looked after her large family, cooked, cleaned, washed, darned, ironed etc, as well as looking after all household monies and its management. She couldn't control how much dad earned and neither could he, as he worked all the overtime he could get, plus Saturday mornings. He would also volunteer to work during his two week's annual holiday period. The only decision mum had to make was, did the family go into debt or did she watch us starve?
Dad was the breadwinner. He earned the money and gave it to mum to do with it what she decided was best for the family. It was mum's job to 'magic it' and spend it! Mum always needed to make economies wherever possible. That usually meant that her children and husband had one meal a day while she did without!
Sociology students please note that in the 1960s, and dating back many centuries, the main meal of the day was the 'dinner', which my family ate at noon, not evening. It would seem that whether you ate dinner at noon or in the evening determined one of the main differences that distinguished the working classes from their 'betters'; the middle and upper classes!
With regard to looking for household economies, there were no places that mum could cut back her expenses; we already got maximum use from the second-hand clothes she bought us at jumble sales for us to wear daily and to put back on our bed at night time to keep us warm as we slept. Come to think of it now, mum probably was a better manager of finance than the best Chancellor this country ever had.
So my mum did what she thought necessary for the family to survive: the same thing every other mum in our situation did at the time: she made friends with the rent man, the tally man and the local grocer, Harry Hodgeson, and she kept on their good side for the next twenty years.
Whereas debt was the 'Hobson's Choice' my mum made when we were growing up, all debt accrued during my first marriage was to provide a lifestyle way above our means, just to keep up with the 'Jones'.
Eventually, I decided to take a leaf out of mum's book to address the problem as my wife showed no sign of not spending what we didn't have in the future. So I did a 'Tommy Cooper' and turned the bank manager from 'acquaintance' into 'friend'. This became relatively easy as we attended the same church and we started having a coffee together after Sunday Mass.Those overdrawn letters from my bank manager stopped once we became the closest of buddies. He even gave me a £2000 overdraft facility (which was virtually unknown in 1970), without me asking for one, just to avoid further difficulties after he retired and a new bank manager was installed at the Cleckheaton branch.
After many years of accumulating debt, I got rid of the debt essentially by getting rid of my wife. There are many ways of dealing effectively with high fear levels today that were not available to my mother in her day, but I must admit that the way she managed to live with her fear of debt did provide me with a way to manage debt during my first marriage, by becoming pally with the bank manager!" William Forde: January 14th, 2018.
