Tendring Topics…….on Line
Good News for those with blood problems
You don't have to have a very serious health problem these days for your family doctor to suggest that you should have a blood test. I'm not sure whether it is because of my age or my blood pressure that my doctor suggests that I should now have one once a year. They're not entirely a formality. Once it revealed that I had a sodium imbalance and on another occasion, too high a cholesterol level. In each case a simple change of medication or diet resulted in a satisfactory result when a repeat sample was taken a couple of months later.
Turning up at the Phlebotomy Department (the 'blood clinic' to you and me) at Clacton Hospital, my heart would sink if I saw half a dozen people standing about outside. It always indicated that the waiting room inside, which is little more than a widened corridor, was full of patients, sometimes with companions, awaiting attention.
First timers to the Blood Clinic often turn up promptly at 9.00 a.m. when the
Clinic opens, imagining that that would mean that they would be dealt with first and get away early. They are a mistaken. Before blood is extracted from the arms of ordinary routine patients like myself, priority patients (those, for instance, for whom it is important that the sample should be taken when they have an empty stomach, and consequently have had no breakfast!) have to be dealt with. That's reasonable enough but it does mean that we run-of-the-mill patients sometimes have to wait till ten o'clock or later before the phlebotomists (blood takers) even begin plunging their needles into our arms. Meanwhile we have to wait in that totally inadequate waiting room where there is sometimes standing room only.
It must be said that, once they do start on us, they proceed with a speed and efficiency that would earn the approval of Count Dracula himself! The queue moves on quite rapidly even though it is likely to be continually replenished by newcomers. I have found that if I turn up at about 11.00 a.m. I don't have too long to wait. However, I do go only very occasionally and it could be that I have just been lucky.
In the New Year there's to be a big change for the better. I mentioned in this blog a few weeks ago that Clacton's Minor Injuries Department had moved to much-improved accommodation immediately opposite the Outpatients Department. Their old accommodation, opposite the present blood clinic, is currently being altered, refurbished, redecorated and re-equipped for the new Phlebotomy Department. There will, I have little doubt, be just as many patients as at present and those with priority needs will still have to be attended to first. However, those of us who have to wait our turn will be able to do so under more comfortable conditions and it is just possible that the refurbishment and re-equipping of the Department will make for an even faster turnover.
I am due for a routine visit to my doctor in Mid-December. She may well suggest that it's time for me to have a routine blood test. If she does I think I'll put off my visit to he hospital until the New Year!
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Home Rule for Essex?
It was only a few months ago that I congratulated Essex County Council on taking over failing post offices and rescuing them from closure. It was a move that was widely applauded, the county council receiving enquiries and letters of support from all over the UK. Could that success have gone to the heads of those in power at County Hall? Certainly some odd messages have emanated from them since.
Remember County Council Chairman Lord Hanningfield declaring that the County Council had a cash turnover exceeding that of a number of independent states and wondering if the County should make a bid for independence from the United Kingdom. He hastily assured us that he had, of course, been joking. But, I wonder!
There was his assertion that if the Government didn't move to improve the A12, the County Council would deal with the matter themselves, totally ignoring the fact that it is unquestionably a central government responsibility and that there is a considerable area of Essex, from Southend-on-Sea to Saffron Walden whose residents really don't give two hoots about the A12 and wouldn't welcome having to pay for it.
Then there has been the County Council's education policy. They, considering themselves wiser than either the Government's Inspectors or the vainly protesting parents of the children concerned, have decided that two Colchester Schools are failing. Their remedy is to close them down and distribute the children among other schools in the town.
Only a week or so ago we learned that the majority party on the County Council, without bothering to consult or even inform the opposition, were advertising for contractors to privatise and take over virtually all of the Council's many services.
Now we have Lord Hanningfield announcing that the council intends to protect the county from downturn by making sure that annual contracts, worth millions of pounds, go to local firms. The intentions are admirable, but what will the auditors say if the Council rejects lower tenders offering better value for money, from contractors just outside the county?
He also announced plans to go ahead with a plan to give a £100 council tax rebate to 30,000 of the most hard-up households, in the first instance to pensioners in their eighties. The scheme would later be extended to include struggling single mums and families of Colchester based soldiers who have been killed or wounded in Afghanistan. Well, I am a pensioner in my eighties but I'm well aware that I am better off than many people younger than I am. This, I hasten to add, is not because I have a large income but because I have no debts, no commitments, no dependents and few expensive tastes. How in any case, is the County Council to know who is, and who isn't, hard up unless they have access to the records of the Inland Revenue. Surely these are strictly confidential.
All of this largesse, however welcome, comes strangely from someone who, not so long ago and after returning from an expensive trip to the USA funded by tax-payers, was wondering sagely whether local authorities could afford the cost of pensioners' bus passes!
Saving the Naze!
The very first Tendring Topic (in print) that I ever wrote, way back in 1980, was on the subject of saving Walton's Naze, threatened as it had been for years, by its crumbling cliffs and the encroaching North Sea. A Government Minister, accompanied by our then MP, had been photographed striding along the edge of the cliffs 'to see for himself'. I suggested that he might have done better to have remained in Westminster, and studied the report of the exhaustive public enquiry into the subject made just a few years earlier by the government's own inspector
This report had recommended following a course of action suggested by the Council's Chief Technical Officer (Mr Colin Bellows) after a survey by his team conducted very shortly after the creation of the new Tendring District Council in 1974. I don't remember the scheme's estimated cost but I do know that it was this that resulted in its being turned down by the government. It was, as is so often the case where a local project is concerned, 'not the right time for it'.
There have been several suggestions for saving the Naze since then, none of which have come to fruition. Meanwhile, the wrecked concrete machine gun emplacement on the beach, built during World War II clearly shows the progress of encroachment. Having toppled from its original position, the distance between it and the foot of the cliffs on the summit of which it once stood gets yearly greater and greater.
Tendring Council's 'cabinet' is now backing the Naze Protection Society's £800,000, 'Crag Walk project' which will include a 100 metre long retaining wall along the beach in the vicinity of the Naze Tower which it is hoped will reduce erosion. There will also be educational public access and a viewing platform in front of the sandstone cliffs. These are rich in relatively recent fossil shells while in the layer of clay at their base fossils of a far earlier age have been found.
The Council will share with the Naze Protection Society the £25,000 cost of an appraisal report before seeking lottery funding.
I hope that the appraisal will include consideration of the report submitted by Colin Bellows shortly after the birth of the Tendring DC. One of its important features was the conclusion that rainwater falling on the surface of the Naze is an important contributory cause of the crumbling of the cliffs. This water passes through the soil and the permeable red sandstone beneath, to the layer of impermeable clay lying deep below at just a little above beach level. The water then flows along the surface of this clay stratum to exit near the base of the cliffs. In doing so it 'lubricates' the surface of the clay and destabilises the red sandstone above it. This causes the sandstone to crumble, fall, and collect at the cliff base from whence it is washed away by the encroaching sea.
Anyone seeking to 'save the Naze' would be unwise to ignore the effect of rain-water falling on the surface of those crumbling cliffs.
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A qualified apology to the Royal Mail
I appear to owe some sort of an apology to the Royal Mail after my criticism of them last week for the secularisation of the special Christmas postage stamps. It seems that there are in fact, religious first and second-class stamps available, if you specially ask for them. They are quite attractive too; two studies of the Blessed Virgin and her child.
My apology is only a qualified one though. The 'religious' stamps (I'd be more inclined to call them the actual Christmas stamps) don't cover the whole price range. There are, for instance, no 'religious' 50p stamps. These are the stamps that are needed for letters and greetings cards to our mainland European friends and neighbours. These mainlanders may well be better acquainted with the story of the Nativity than many people in this country. They are however unlikely to be familiar with the British tradition of pantomime and even less likely to be acquainted with Peter Pan.
I can well imagine the question being asked in a score of different languages at European breakfast tables during the next few weeks: 'Why on earth have the mad English decided to put a picture of a one-armed pirate on their Christmas stamps?' Then again, the religious stamps should have been better publicised? I didn't know about them. It's true that I don't regularly buy a national daily newspaper but I do watch both national and local news bulletins on tv. Other friends of mine, who possibly get out and about more than I do, didn't know about them either.
When, a week or so ago, I went into my local branch post office and asked for Christmas stamps, I was simply offered the secular ones and not told that there was an alternative. This morning I went to Clacton's main Post Office and specifically asked for religious Christmas stamps, so I now have some. The Post Office and the Royal Mail (I find it difficult to work out which is responsible for what!) manage to give plenty of publicity to their other services. The religious alternative stamps though, are about as well advertised as the vegetarian option in a butcher's shop!
May I urge readers who feel as strongly about this matter as I do, to stock up with 1st and 2nd Class Christmas stamps. Their use isn't limited to Christmas. You can use them throughout the year and the year after that. They quietly and unostentatiously proclaim your Christian faith and, since they are labelled simply 1st and 2nd Class, they could prove to be a useful investment when mail charges go up again as they surely will in the not-too-distant future.
What is also important is the fact that every religious Christmas stamp that is bought will make it more difficult for the Royal Mail next autumn to claim smugly: 'We issued a religious alternative to the secular mid-winter festival stamps last year. Few people wanted to buy the religious stamps though so we won't do it again'.
It is surely the religious stamps that should be printed in every denomination and sold as the norm. Secular ones, for some notional mid-winter festival, could be made available for those with a conscientious objection to the Christian faith. These, I think, would prove to be quite a small minority.
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