My song today is ‘The Twelfth of Never’. This is a popular song that was written in 1956 and first recorded by Johnny Mathis the following year. The title is a popular expression, which is used as the date of a future occurrence that will never come to pass. In the case of the song, "the 12th of Never" is given as the date on which the singer will stop loving his beloved, thus indicating that he will ‘always’ love her.
Mathis initially disliked the song, which was released as the flip side to his number 1 hit single ‘Chances Are’. ‘The Twelfth of Never’ was written by Jerry Livingston and Paul Francis Webster. With the exception of the bridge, the tune was adapted from ‘The Riddle Song’ (also known as ‘I Gave My Love a Cherry’), an old English folk song. Mathis's original version reached Number 9 on what is now called the ‘Billboard Hot 100’in 1957 in the U.S.A. A version by Cliff Richard was released in 1964 and reached Number 8 in the UK. Donny Osmond’s version was his second Number 1 single in the UK, spending a single week at the top of the ‘Uk Singles Chart’ in March 1973. In the U.S. it peaked at Number 8. The song was also covered by Tammy Wynette on her album ’The Ways to Love A Man’ in 1970 and Elvis Presley covered the song in 1995 that reached Number 21 in the UK.
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I suppose if I was to choose a favourite version and style of this song it would be made up of a combination of Tammy Wynette and Elvis Presley’s covers.
This song occurred during a time in my life when all movement seemed to have stopped for me and it looked like I would never experience some of the things that young boys dream about. Four years earlier, I’d experienced a life-threatening accident when a wagon ran over me and wrapped my fallen body around its main drive shaft axel. Having been left with multiple injuries (which included a damaged spine), it was feared that I’d never walk again.
For the following three years I didn’t walk, and all the boyhood dreams I had seemed to have entered ‘the twelfth of never’ territory. Prior to my accident, I had loved sports and had excelled in sprinting and playing football. Indeed, I was good enough at football to play in the senior team at the age of 11 years with 14-year-old pupils at ‘St Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’. I’d been born in Ireland and I dreamed of one day playing for the Irish National Team, just as my father had done during his early twenties. I thought, “If dad could play for County Kilkenny and then go on to play for the national Irish soccer squad, why shouldn’t I also?”
One year before this song came out, I’d started to regain my mobility and had begun to hobble about again. I’d also started attending ‘Dewsbury Technical College’ after a three-year absence from school, but I commenced six months after all my class peers had started their school term. Having previously been accustomed to being the first in the class, I now found myself in the middle range of pupils. I was also being educated in subjects that my Catholic School education never taught and despite being above average intelligence, I struggled educationally for the first time in my life. Once again I’d entered ‘the twelfth of never’ territory and possible occupations such as a doctor, surgeon, and barrister that I had often imagined I might one day become also seemed to drift into the far distance.
So, having a personality and character flaw which told me if I couldn’t be guaranteed a cricketing century then I would take my bat home and withdraw from the field of play, I left school before taking my G.C.E. ‘O’ and ‘A-Level’ examinations. The following Monday I was working in a Cleckheaton Mill as a Bobbin Boy earning £2: 15 shillings a week.
As the years progressed, so did I in so many areas of expertise that I could never have imagined in my childhood dreaming days.
I became the youngest Youth Leader in Great Britain at the age of 18 years, and shortly after, I was also made the youngest textile Shop Steward in Great Britain. I became a textile foreman at the age of 23 years and a Mill Manager at the age of 25 years. I became one of the country’s foremost Relaxation Trainers, I introduced Relaxation training into prisons, hostels, hospitals, educational establishment, psychiatric centres, probation offices, churches, and the community. I also established procedures to access involuntary behaviour through a combination of imagination exercises/relaxation techniques/hypnotherapy and thereby change behaviour patterns more easily. During the early 1970s, I founded ‘Anger Management’, and established systematised procedures and methods of effectively dealing with one’s anger states that mushroomed across the English-speaking world within a matter of two years.
As I came to learn more about ones’ mind/body/beliefs, I gradually came to accept that there are very few things in life which are unattainable and very few dreams that cannot be realised once one has learned how best harness one’s mind, body and belief system, unify them in a single purpose and direct them towards the destination of one’s dream.
Since early 2013, when I was diagnosed with terminal blood cancer (with an approximate three-year-life-span diagnosis) I have had four different malignant cancers, two nine-month courses of chemotherapy, eight cancer operations under a full anaesthetic and twenty sessions of radiotherapy. I recently developed cancer in my neck and will have another big operation on March 10th, 2020 that will take up to four hours and involve two cancer surgeons.
I have always been a collector of one thing or another. I have always loved words and used to collect them. Collecting words cost nothing and I gained a sense of tremendous satisfaction learning a new word daily to add to my vocabulary). I then became an expert at collecting my thoughts and placing them into imaginative and effective relaxation training techniques. I have always been a worker, a doer who hated wasting time and energy. I always sensed that facing fears instead of running away from them was better for a person. So, I preferred to face my fears instead of avoiding them, and I learned to turn a threat into a challenge by ‘making the best of what little I had’ (one of my mother’s sayings). Even at a very early age, I accepted that when a person established a behaviour pattern of avoidance, instead of moving forward with their life, they become stranded where they stand.
It is this later realisation in my life of the immense power that the mind has over the body and which one’s belief has over one’s mind that has made my ‘twelfth of never’ less likely the longer I live. During the past fifty years, while becoming more flexible in my thinking, I have become stronger in religious belief. I have come to know the power of prayer, I have come to cherish the comfort that the prayers of others can bring me and I have found the one true constant in the life of every person who lives and breathes is ‘Love’ itself.
‘Love’ is the only answer to all the questions capable of being asked. It is the single most important emotion that mankind is capable of feeling. It is the bond that binds all humanity to goodness incarnate; it is the one force that enables us to endure all earthly struggle, and it provides us with the very climate that embraces all kinds of weather in our day.
Love and peace Bill xxx