Week 13.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘The Year’s at the Spring….

…………and the day’s at the morn.
The lark’s on the wing, and the snail’s on the thorn.
Morning’s at seven, the hillside’s dew-pearled.
God’s in his Heaven; all’s right with the World’

So sang Pippa, in Browning’s poem ‘Pippa Passes’, on a very similar morning and at much the same time as that on which I am typing these words. It would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that all is right with today’s world, and I hope and believe that God isn’t confined to ‘his Heaven’ but is also present and active in his Creation.

Otherwise, I fully endorse Pippa’s sentiments. Even a world-weary old man like me feels a lift in his heart on such a morning, especially when looking out of the kitchen window I see the daffodils, golden in the early sunshine, blooming round the apple tree in my garden. Mind you the scene also brings back memories of the many, many similar spring mornings on which I looked out of that window at those same golden daffodils with Heather, my wife for sixty years, who is sadly no longer with me.

Wind-farm Progress

On recent visits to Clacton both my sons and daughters-in-law have driven along the sea front to see any signs of the developing wind-farm. There hasn’t really been a great deal to be seen. Some kind of structure was just visible and one or more craft near it were the only evidence that anything was taking place.

All that is due to change within the next few weeks. The Danish construction company’s heavy lift ship Titan 2 is getting ready for service at Harwich and will very shortly sail out to the Gunfleet Sands to erect the first turbine. Six of these have already arrived from Denmark and are to be erected on the foundations that have been prepared for them during the past six months.

The turbines will be commissioned in phases as they are erected and the electric cables between each turbine and the off-shore substation laid. It is expected that the first group will be fully operational before the end of the summer. The work of installation will continue until its completion some time next year. When the wind-farm is complete it is expected that it will generate 172 megawatts, enough electricity to meet the needs of 120,000 homes ….the equivalent of 90 percent of the homes in Colchester and the Tendring District.

Solar Heating Progress

It is good to see a ‘green’ project being pursued with vigour and, despite the vagaries of wind and weather, adhering to a timetable laid down many months ago.

I wish that I could feel quite the same of progress toward the installation of a solar powered water heating system for my bungalow, which should reduce markedly my own dependence upon gas for water heating (but see Late News on the Solar Front at the end of this item) It got off to a splendid start. Little more than a week after I had made my first tentative enquiry Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems’ surveyor had inspected my bungalow, made notes of my bungalow’s requirements and had confirmed my own belief that the solar heating installation would prove to be a pretty straight-forward job. Scarcely more than a week after that I had a phone call to inform me that the next day would see the fitting of the solar heating panels on my roof. This would be followed by a date on which the internal plumbing alterations and the connection of the solar heating system to the existing hot water supply system would take place.

Exactly as promised two very pleasant young men arrived with their van and did the necessary work on the roof of my bungalow quickly and efficiently. They fitted two solar panels, together with two much smaller panels one on each side of them. The purpose of these (photo-electric cells?) is to drive the pump that will circulate the antifreeze solution through the two solar panels and thence through my hot water system. The system will thus operate independently of the bungalow’s electricity supply.

The solar panels go up on my roof

The two young men told me that the remainder of the operation was usually carried out about a week after their visit. They advised me to phone Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems if I hadn’t heard from them by that time.

The roof job completed. To the left of the solar panels you can see the photo-electric cell operating the pump. My mobility scooter ('iron horse') complete with all-weather canopy, is in the foreground.

I didn’t hear from them and on 17th March I phoned as advised and asked when the job would be completed. The reply was unsettling. There was a component needed for my particular hot water system that they hadn’t yet been able to get hold of. They weren’t yet able to tell me when they’d be able to complete the job. Yes, they thought that it would be before Easter ….but couldn’t give a firm promise.

The claim that my system needed some unique component didn’t accord either with the assurance of the firm’s own surveyor that it would be a perfectly straightforward job, or with my own assessment of the situation.

It is a week later, and I have just phoned the firm again. This time I did at least learn which component it is that they're waiting for...........and it now makes sense. When the system is in operation water will be heated by the sun's radiation in a series of copper tubes within the glass-fronted solar panels on the roof. These will be connected to heat exchanging tubes within a heavily insulated copper cylinder in my roof space, thus heating the water in that cylinder.

The cold water supply to the hot water system will be connected to this cylinder instead of to the main storage cylinder below and a connecting pipe from the upper cylinder to the main one below will take its place. Thus all water flowing into the main storage cylinder will be pre-heated from the upper solar heated cylinder. In the winter it will supplement the boiler as a source of heat for hot water supply. In the summer it may well replace it altogether.

The missing component is, in fact, the special upper cylinder to be heated by the solar panels.

This is, of course, absolutely vital to the system and I am persuaded that the installers are doing their best to expedite its delivery. I shall just have to be patient. Sadly, I fear that those who know me best would not include patience among my most conspicuous characteristics!

Late News on the Solar Front!

I won't need to exercise my limited supply of patience after all. I wrote the above this morning (24th March) and at 3.45 p.m. this afternoon I received a phone call to say that the special cylinder had now arrived and that they would be calling on me tomorrow morning between 9.00 a.m. and 11.00 a.m., to complete the installation! I am more than pleased and hope that next week I'll be able to give you a glowing report of the system's installation and early functioning.

Golden (and diamond-studded!) Handshakes

When I referred a few weeks to Sir Fred Goodwin’s walking away from the ruins of the Royal Bank of Scotland, at the age of fifty, with a pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds a year I really didn’t think that that was the last we would hear of the matter. Surely, I thought, either he will see the reason for the public outrage and relinquish at least part of that enormous pension, or the government will find some way of relieving him of it.

Well, I was right about our not having heard the last of the matter but quite wrong about Sir Fred losing any part of his pension either compulsorily or voluntarily. The latest news that we have heard about this sorry affair is that in addition to his almost three quarters of a million a year pension (well over £1,500 a day!!), he has received a lump sum payment of £3 million!

It certainly pays to be a top person! I have little doubt that if the irresponsibility or incompetence of any junior or middle ranking employees of the RBS had cost the bank even a few thousand pounds, they wouldn’t have been encouraged, urged or even bullied into resigning or taking early retirement. They’d have been summarily sacked!

Town Hall Jargon

I was both interested and pleased to see that the Local Government Association is campaigning to ban the use of ‘Town Hall jargon’ by local government officials. I hate it myself and hope that I never used it when I was a local government official. Words and phrases guaranteed to set my teeth on edge were ‘monies’ (instead of money), ‘human resources’ (instead of employees), ‘interface’, ‘multidisciplinary’, ‘scenario’ and ‘proactive’.

I also disliked people being asked on official forms not for their ‘sex’ but their ‘gender’. These days sexually explicit words that a generation or two ago would have resulted in the user being barred from any reputable pub, are heard daily on tv. Can we at the same time possibly have reached a stage in which ‘sex’ in its proper sense, ‘that which differentiates males from females’, has become a rude three-letter word that mustn’t on any account be used on official forms?

Among the Local Government Association’s pet hates are ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘can do culture’, ‘performance network’ and ‘lowlights’. Like me, they also include ‘interface’ among their dislikes.
‘Lowlights’, I have to say, is a word that I had never previously encountered. As the opposite of ‘highlights’ I can see that it could be quite effective. I can imagine myself using it sometime. Of the other phrases I share the LGA’s feelings but, like many of my own dislikes, I don’t think of them as being exclusively Town Hall jargon. Apart from ‘interface’ I heard none of them during my local government career and think that council officials who use them are imitating the go-ahead young men of the private sector. I can imagine them being part of the small-talk in an advertising agency, an insurance office or among ambitious young salesmen.

The late Sir John Betjeman lampooned this ‘new-speak’ in his poem The Executive, which clearly wasn’t referring to a Council official:

You ask me what it is I do. Well actually, you know
I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
Essentially I integrate the current export drive
And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five

For vital off-the-record work (that’s talking transport-wise)
I’ve a scarlet Aston-Martin …and does she go? She flies!…….

……..and so on, in Sir John’s own special style.

A leading article in the Daily Gazette (recently the Coast Gazette and earlier the Evening Gazette) applauds the Local Government Association’s campaign. Dwellers in glass houses really should think twice though before throwing stones. It isn’t for nothing that sloppy, inaccurate and exaggerated writing is called journalese!

Post Office Local Banks?

‘What do Post Offices know about banking?’ asked a Radio 4 listener scornfully, at the suggestion that Post Offices might serve a useful role as local banks. ‘Quite a lot’, would have been my answer.

My current account has, for over half a century, been with the Co-op Bank. The nearest branch is in Colchester. However from my local (or any) Post Office I can with my debit card, draw up to £200 cash from my account at any time. I can also pay cheques into my account there and, when paying a visit to mainland Europe, can change my pounds sterling into Euros. Unspent Euros can be changed back again into pounds on my return.

Last year when I made such a trip I returned with forty Polish Zlotys and sixty Czech Krone in my wallet. My local post office couldn’t help but Clacton’s main post office in High Street instantly changed them back into pounds and pence.

The Post Office also manages savings accounts and insurances. Those, with the others I have mentioned, are I think something like three quarters of the services that ordinary people expect from a bank.

If some or all of the other services that we may seek in commercial banks were available from Post Offices, I would be very surprised if they failed to provide them at least as efficiently (and probably a lot less expensively!) than did those who have landed us in our current economic crisis.

‘A host of golden daffodils!’

These daffodils, possibly because they are on the north side of the church, are less advanced than those shown at the beginning of this blog. But this enormous host of ‘Easter Lilies’ will be a spectacular sight by the time the members of the congregation of St. James’ Church, Clacton gather for worship and thanksgiving on Easter morning! ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,’ they will surely rival those in the Lake District that delighted and inspired William Wordsworth some two hundred years ago.