About White Feather

My name is Ken Corish. I am a Liverpudlian now living in Plymouth, Devon, UK and am sometimes a musician but mostly an Educational ICT Adviser with Plymouth Local Authority. I have a wife, Donna, who is my best friend and we have four very lovely and very different daughters. Oh yes, and three grandchildren.

I guess I am not a technically gifted musician but what meagre abilities I do have I got from my Mum. She saw what was in me and bought me my first guitar and a copy of the "Beatles Complete" book. That combination was a revelation to me and my saviour; not only did it open a world of music to me but it changed my horizons and goals in just a few rapid years. 

It says a lot about her too that she broke my first guitar over my head; but also that she swiftly gave me the money to replace it. A quick temper she certainly had; but she could break into song too at any given moment and always encouraged me to sing. She was dancer in her youth and a very good one at that. She should have gone further but a combination of factors strove to limit her aspirations. It's a shame because she was a talented girl. She used to tell us about "entertaining the troops" at concerts which always raised a laugh and a few Catholic eyebrows. 

She was always a vibrant, energetic, rumbustious, frustrating and formidable lady so when she was diagnosed with lung cancer it knocked us all sideways. We had to consider what life would be like without her.

And she changed ... slowly and inexorably despite relentless chemo and radio and all of the side effects these induce. She fought it all and gained a few precious years. But in the end she died; too soon for all of us.

And I missed her ... a gaping vacuum that sucked every emotion from within me and threw it into a wasteful void. And I went on missing her and couldn't stop. I needed her to listen just once more.

And that's when the guitar saved me. The guitar that she had encouraged me to learn; that's how I got to speak to her just once more.

And she listens ...