I dedicate my song today to Caroline D, Caz Astley who lives in Bolton, Greater Manchester, and also Liz Divine who lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Both Caroline and Liz celebrate their birthday today. Have an enjoyable day, Caroline and Liz, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.
My song today is, “It’s Only Make Believe” This song was written by drummer Jack Nance and Mississippi-born singer Conway Twitty. Conway. The single topped both U.S. and the ‘UK Singles Chart’ and became the only Number 1 pop single of his career. The song was a hit in 22 different countries. It was also made popular by recordings by The Hollies, Glen Campbell, and Billy Fury.
I first heard the song sung by English singer, musician, songwriter, and actor, Billy Fury. Born in April 1940, Billy Fury died on 28th January 1983. Given that today is the 37th anniversary of Billy Fury’s death, it is appropriate to make my song today, one that he recorded and is associated with.
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I used to be a ‘Daily Mail’ reader for many years between 1980-1990, and I enjoyed following the daily views of a newspaper columnist called Ann Lesley. I will never forget her once writing “Things are invariably the opposite of what they appear to be”. While this was a philosophical view which I had held to be true for many years, I nevertheless began to view it anew as soon as I put the newspaper down. Ann’s description hit the nail on the head with perfectly applied force, and with far fewer words than I would have had to use to say the same thing. I marvelled with a tinge of writer’s envy how Ann Lesley had dressed a thought so commonly known, in clothes so exquisitely arranged. The beauty of the whole article instantly commanded the reader's admiration. Within me I felt a natural temptation and naked ambition of an inquisitive wordsmith to strip Ann’s description to the bone, thereby revealing the thought of her original idea and the marrow she chose to feed it with.
Mind you, writing for a living was her daily work, and apart from a few brief articles I had penned for the magazine ‘Social Work Today’ at the time, I had not yet ventured into any form of paid professional expression. It would be 1990 before my first children’s book was published and I joined the ranks of a budding author wanting to be read by an admiring readership. It is only after 64 published novels later that I can honestly say that I write ‘okay’, but not okay enough that I fail to be frequently enthralled by the writing of many other authors, who possess such modesty of pen that they just cannot appreciate ‘how good they really are’.
I do not plan to write any more novels, and my writing these days is confined to my daily Facebook posts. This daily post involves the exercising of much restraint on my part. My preferred writing style is to adopt a conversational approach to whatever subject I am writing about. This is perfectly fine for delivering talks to an attentive audience, but the written word, as opposed to the spoken, performs better in a different style.
Often, my mind will become absorbed in a single thought, and before I realise it, an hour or so will have gone by and I will have typed a turgid treatise. Like a beer glass filled to the brim with overflowing content, a single mouthful forces the drinker to digest too much in one taste. When my writer’s imagination takes flight, it is liable to land anywhere. My mind tends to stray so much that I am frequently surprised that anyone reads anything I ever write at all.
If there is an art in writing, it rests in knowing the nature of one’s readership. I have always worked on the safe assumption that there are essentially two kinds of readers; those who see, and those who see ‘when they are shown’. One kind is the lazy reader who lies on a sun lounge at the side of a swimming pool and neither wants to move body nor mind unnecessarily while they thumb the pages and chill out. This type of reader likes the understanding of any text to be spelled out on the page without any need to think. The more engaged readers around the pool will appreciate that authors often mean much more than they say and that one sentence can carry two meanings. They require a deeper understanding that can only be arrived at by diving into the writer’s pool of thought several times. Whichever readership one predominantly writes for determines one’s style of writing.
The most important benefit derived by any author is having the opportunity to express oneself, by expressing one’s feelings, and views in the written word. Some authors seek to enlighten, some want to educate, and some wish to entertain. Some, like the original-stated aims of the B.B.C., sought to do all three. Good writers engage, excite, exhilarate, and send the mind of the reader on a journey they never want to end. The greatest danger of all authors is that we get to like the sound of our own voice too much, and we often get lost in the forest of words we plant on the page.
Any author seeking common acclaim and desiring words of praise inscribed on their tombstone can always commission the work themselves with the stonemason before he dies. In that way, he should not be dissatisfied with what folk will think of him when they pass his grave in years to come, especially strangers who never knew the deceased, or heard his name before they walked through the cemetery that day. That is the way of the world when legacies are dreamed of by the living.
One of my firmest beliefs lends itself to the thought that there nothing which is either true or false, good or bad, that thinking it so will not make it so. William Shakespeare’s character Hamlet echoes this belief of mine when he states in his play of the same name “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. How easy it is for the bard to do an Ann Lesley on me any day of the week!
Come to think of it, there has always been some dispute as to whether William Shakespeare was indeed the author of some of the famous works ascribed to him. It is known that he did commission the words on his tombstone while he still lived. Did you know that some believe that Shakespeare's grave is cursed? Even though Shakespeare knew he would be buried under a stone slab inside a church, Shakespeare was worried about grave robbers and people disturbing his bones. To scare off any potential thieves, Shakespeare wrote and commissioned the following epitaph as a deterrent:
“Good friend for Jesus sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.”
The curse is taken so seriously that as recently as 2008 construction workers were careful to work around the bones without disturbing them. Unfortunately, at some point, someone less reputable, and less afraid of curses, seems to have stolen his skull. Even the great Shakespeare was liable to lose his head in some circumstances.
Love and peace
Bill xxx