I include two songs to start off this New Year’s Day. Today, I place my mind and focus on three areas.
First, we wish a happy birthday to Marian McBride who lives in Newbridge, Kildare, Ireland. We also extend birthday greetings to John Kelly Waterford who lives in Waterford, Ireland, and Ellen Barrett. I hope that Marian, John, and Ellen enjoy their special day and that the coming year bodes well for them, and their families.
Many of you like me will have unfortunately experienced the death of family members and close friends over the past year. My sincere condolences go out to all of you in your loss. There have been seven people whose bereavement I have felt, but four of them in particular.
I have lost two family members, one best friend, and one long-term friend. In April 2020, (Mark Walsworth) the partner to my niece, Sam Swales died from Covid-19 aged 50 years. The family unit had moved from West Yorkshire up to Aberdeen a few months earlier to start life afresh. In July 2020, Sheila’s brother and only sibling, Winston, (62 years) died during a prolonged period of depression following an unwanted marital separation and divorce. Winston and Sheila found it impossible to obtain the psychiatric help he required, and tragically, Winston killed himself during a Lockdown period. A month earlier in June 2020, my best friend, Tony Walsh, who lived in Tipperary, Ireland sadly died. We had known each other for over fifty years since being teenagers. Around the same time, my late mother’s favourite singer and a good friend of mine over the past thirty years, Dame Vera Lynn, died aged 103. With the passing of these four people, we lost a part of our family, a cherished part of my childhood experiences, and early memories of my mother singing along with Vera Lynn’s voice on the radio as the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ continued to lift the nation’s spirits after the ‘Second World War’. This past year has tragically touched the lives of so many people. Until they meet again.
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Given the nature of the year we have all just lived through, we have all had it hard, and some have unfortunately had it tougher than others. While parts of the country have kept millions of citizens separated from their loved ones and family during Lockdowns across the land, there have been thousands of others who have had to grieve the permanent loss of a loved one to either Covid-19 or some other illness which has killed them before their time. Because of government restrictions of movement and other freedoms in a bid to control both populace and virus, many dozens of small yet important things we previously took for granted were denied us during our daily lives.
For much of the past seventy years, since the end of the 'Second World War', the world had turned on its steady axis of small alteration until recent climate warnings began to loom large, alongside economic stringencies and the implementation of more austere political programmes of different governments. Then, just as the world started to face an economic turnabout for the better, and life started to seem smoother, along came this pernicious pandemic virus that cast its deadly shroud of grief and death across the globe like a grim reaper of eternal gloom.
Before mankind had even time to think what was happening, the earth suddenly spun into mass uncertainty, economic collapse, and political meltdown as deathly fear and damaging doubt were sown. Before long, the ‘official news’ was being directly challenged by the ‘conspiracist theorists’, (and aided by an army of both educated and educationally illiterate social media trolls) each camp of 'fixed opinion' accused the other doing their fellow man down. According to those who did not believe the government of the day (whichever country they lived in) government propaganda supported by dubious establishment figures, no-nothing scientists, wildly inaccurate and unsubstantiated statistics, along with deliberate deceit was being used to control the populous. Numbers of people remaining with an ounce of objectivity grew fewer and fewer until even they started to doubt whether the emperor was clothed or naked? Even the proclaimed life-saving vaccine to recently be approved for public distribution was being rubbished and relabelled by some disapprovers as being a dangerous, deadly, and a D.N.A-altering substance!
Meanwhile, as these two ‘intelligence camps’ continued to actively agitate against ‘the facts‘ that each of them was putting out, the lives of ordinary people all around them were being ruined beyond redemption. People died directly from Covid-19 and others died because Covid-19 worsened an already vulnerable underlying illness or condition of theirs. Others died because Covid-19 was prioritised in our hospitals above other potentially fatal conditions and illnesses that had to take second place in the bed queue.
Whatever the reason, more people died, and many more people were left to grieve their loved ones with the knowledge that they could not be at their bedside during their final moments to hold their hands and console them. Even after their death, the bereaved were further pained when they were even denied providing a proper burial and send off for them on the day of their funeral service.
As well as all the above, businesses went bust, millions of jobs were lost, debt spiralled, bankruptcies became more common as houses were repossessed, national depression deepened, suicides increased, and many marriages broke up that might otherwise have survived. And amid all this misery mounting up around the many countries of the world, innocent lovers were kept apart, marriages were unable to take place and courting couples were expected to wash their hands whenever they broke the courtship code of ‘no-touch romance’ and failed to keep their ‘amorous advances‘ at the recommended safe distance of two metres.
Let us hope that in the New Year common sense and mutual trust can once more break out between the two Covid-2021 camps of opposing opinion, and just as the divided country has had to come to terms with Brexit, so, I suspect, it will also have to reconcile itself with future expectations relating to vaccine use, propriety, and efficacy.
For all of you, I hope that you each will be able to find ‘Someplace: Somehow: Someday: Somewhere’ where love, peace of mind, and a happy reunion with deceased loved ones can be experienced once more.
Happy New Year and Love and Peace to you all.
Bill and Sheila xxx
First, we wish a happy birthday to Marian McBride who lives in Newbridge, Kildare, Ireland. We also extend birthday greetings to John Kelly Waterford who lives in Waterford, Ireland, and Ellen Barrett. I hope that Marian, John, and Ellen enjoy their special day and that the coming year bodes well for them, and their families.
Many of you like me will have unfortunately experienced the death of family members and close friends over the past year. My sincere condolences go out to all of you in your loss. There have been seven people whose bereavement I have felt, but four of them in particular.
I have lost two family members, one best friend, and one long-term friend. In April 2020, (Mark Walsworth) the partner to my niece, Sam Swales died from Covid-19 aged 50 years. The family unit had moved from West Yorkshire up to Aberdeen a few months earlier to start life afresh. In July 2020, Sheila’s brother and only sibling, Winston, (62 years) died during a prolonged period of depression following an unwanted marital separation and divorce. Winston and Sheila found it impossible to obtain the psychiatric help he required, and tragically, Winston killed himself during a Lockdown period. A month earlier in June 2020, my best friend, Tony Walsh, who lived in Tipperary, Ireland sadly died. We had known each other for over fifty years since being teenagers. Around the same time, my late mother’s favourite singer and a good friend of mine over the past thirty years, Dame Vera Lynn, died aged 103. With the passing of these four people, we lost a part of our family, a cherished part of my childhood experiences, and early memories of my mother singing along with Vera Lynn’s voice on the radio as the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ continued to lift the nation’s spirits after the ‘Second World War’. This past year has tragically touched the lives of so many people. Until they meet again.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Given the nature of the year we have all just lived through, we have all had it hard, and some have unfortunately had it tougher than others. While parts of the country have kept millions of citizens separated from their loved ones and family during Lockdowns across the land, there have been thousands of others who have had to grieve the permanent loss of a loved one to either Covid-19 or some other illness which has killed them before their time. Because of government restrictions of movement and other freedoms in a bid to control both populace and virus, many dozens of small yet important things we previously took for granted were denied us during our daily lives.
For much of the past seventy years, since the end of the 'Second World War', the world had turned on its steady axis of small alteration until recent climate warnings began to loom large, alongside economic stringencies and the implementation of more austere political programmes of different governments. Then, just as the world started to face an economic turnabout for the better, and life started to seem smoother, along came this pernicious pandemic virus that cast its deadly shroud of grief and death across the globe like a grim reaper of eternal gloom.
Before mankind had even time to think what was happening, the earth suddenly spun into mass uncertainty, economic collapse, and political meltdown as deathly fear and damaging doubt were sown. Before long, the ‘official news’ was being directly challenged by the ‘conspiracist theorists’, (and aided by an army of both educated and educationally illiterate social media trolls) each camp of 'fixed opinion' accused the other doing their fellow man down. According to those who did not believe the government of the day (whichever country they lived in) government propaganda supported by dubious establishment figures, no-nothing scientists, wildly inaccurate and unsubstantiated statistics, along with deliberate deceit was being used to control the populous. Numbers of people remaining with an ounce of objectivity grew fewer and fewer until even they started to doubt whether the emperor was clothed or naked? Even the proclaimed life-saving vaccine to recently be approved for public distribution was being rubbished and relabelled by some disapprovers as being a dangerous, deadly, and a D.N.A-altering substance!
Meanwhile, as these two ‘intelligence camps’ continued to actively agitate against ‘the facts‘ that each of them was putting out, the lives of ordinary people all around them were being ruined beyond redemption. People died directly from Covid-19 and others died because Covid-19 worsened an already vulnerable underlying illness or condition of theirs. Others died because Covid-19 was prioritised in our hospitals above other potentially fatal conditions and illnesses that had to take second place in the bed queue.
Whatever the reason, more people died, and many more people were left to grieve their loved ones with the knowledge that they could not be at their bedside during their final moments to hold their hands and console them. Even after their death, the bereaved were further pained when they were even denied providing a proper burial and send off for them on the day of their funeral service.
As well as all the above, businesses went bust, millions of jobs were lost, debt spiralled, bankruptcies became more common as houses were repossessed, national depression deepened, suicides increased, and many marriages broke up that might otherwise have survived. And amid all this misery mounting up around the many countries of the world, innocent lovers were kept apart, marriages were unable to take place and courting couples were expected to wash their hands whenever they broke the courtship code of ‘no-touch romance’ and failed to keep their ‘amorous advances‘ at the recommended safe distance of two metres.
Let us hope that in the New Year common sense and mutual trust can once more break out between the two Covid-2021 camps of opposing opinion, and just as the divided country has had to come to terms with Brexit, so, I suspect, it will also have to reconcile itself with future expectations relating to vaccine use, propriety, and efficacy.
For all of you, I hope that you each will be able to find ‘Someplace: Somehow: Someday: Somewhere’ where love, peace of mind, and a happy reunion with deceased loved ones can be experienced once more.
Happy New Year and Love and Peace to you all.
Bill and Sheila xxx
