Spring is here – at last!
Well, it is as I write these words, but it is possible that by the time I post them on the web winter will have returned. However, no matter how low the temperature may yet fall, the evidence of spring will still be present in the daffodils in tens of thousands of gardens and parks and on roadside verges and traffic roundabouts throughout the land. They are one feature in our public gardens that, this year at least, shouldn’t have been too badly affected by ‘the cuts’. Most of those lovely golden and white flowers will spring from bulbs planted several years ago! From the kitchen window of my bungalow there is a splendid view of my quite-large back garden. From it, my late wife Heather used to watch the evidence of the changing seasons – in winter the bare boughs of the apple trees, and, by the rear boundary wall, the four silver birches that we brought back as tiny saplings from a long-ago Devon holiday.
My bungalow from half way down the back garden. The kitchen window is the one on the left. The apple on the left of the picture is a Bramley cooker on a tree directly behind the camera. Also behind the camera is an eating apple tree around which the daffodils grow, a large now-uncultivated plot where there was once a once-productive ‘kitchen garden’ and, against the boundary wall, four silver birches. The first indication that spring was on its way was the flowering of a few tiny snowdrops round 
the apple tree. They were followed by the crocuses, and finally the daffodils, though their shoots had sprung from the soil weeks before the flowers appeared. As spring progressed into summer Heather would watch me mowing the lawn and working in the kitchen garden. There were potatoes, broad beans, garden peas, spring cabbages, courgettes and tomatoes. There would be at least one colourful row of sweet peas, mostly destined to grace the table at the Quaker Meeting House on early-summer Sundays, or to be given to friends and neighbours. Finally, as summer was drawing towards its close, there would be a bumper crop of runner beans. Sadly, for the past five years, there has been none of these. I can garden no longer but I have a gardener who comes in once a fortnight to keep the grass cut and the garden tidy. The daffodils are still there. It was there, where they are reborn annually from the slowly warming soil, that on one sad day nearly five years ago, I scattered Heather’s ashes. I hope that when my time comes, my ashes are scattered there too.Sex – and the Census!
Have you filled in and sent off your census form yet? I mine was posted on the 28th. It had looked a little daunting at first glance but in fact, it was easy enough to complete and it does help the government to distribute resources where they are most needed and to identify areas where there are specific problems. Retired folk are asked about their ‘last job’. I immediately thought of mine as being a local government Public Relations Officer. Then I remembered that after taking early retirement at the age of nearly-59 I had pursued, for over twenty years, a second modestly successful career as a self-employed freelance author and journalist, writing several technical books and innumerable feature articles and advertising features of all kinds. In fact, although I now do no paid work I have not, at 89, entirely given it up! That was surely my ‘last job’. In today’s Godless world, the question relating to religion is an obstacle for some people. I understand that some of my fellow-Quakers hesitate to describe themselves as ‘Christian’. George Fox whose faith, charisma and organising ability founded the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the 17th Century, would surely have been astonished. His moment of inspiration had come when, in a moment of deepest despair with the established and dissenting churches of his day, he had heard an inward voice proclaim that ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition’. And then, as he recorded in his journal, his heart, ‘did leap with joy’. It was an affirmation that was at the heart of early – and not-so-early – Quakerism. One feature of the census form that pleased me is the fact that we are asked to fill in our sex, male or female, not – as has now become politically correct – our gender! Gender was, and still is for some of us, a grammatical word differentiating words, not people. Our French master at Ipswich’s Northgate School in the 1930s pointed out that the French word for an army recruit was in fact feminine though, in those days, all recruits were male. He would routinely ask the class ‘Is gender the same as sex?’ to which we were expected to reply emphatically and as one! ‘No sir!’ I think that the popularity of gender in politically correct English is due to the fact that we have so misused the word ‘sex’ that it has become a rude word that ‘nice people’ are reluctant to use. That is surely extraordinary when, in conversations in the street, and often in radio and tv programmes, one can hear real rude words (the use of which would have resulted in the speaker being barred from well-run pubs in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s) being used loudly and with careless abandon!
Referendums
Mr Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s MP, is well known for his extreme Euro-Scepticism and his conviction that, if climatic change is taking place, it is nothing to do with human activity. His latest campaign is for a national referendum on whether or not the United Kingdom should remain in membership of the European Union. There was, of course, a referendum on the subject in 1975 in which the general public decided conclusively that they did wish to retain membership. But, says Mr Carswell, that was then. Only those who were of voting age before 1975 were able to vote. We now have a new generation of voters – and their voices should be heard. Perhaps there should always be regular referendums on matters of national importance. As far as the EU is concerned not only were those born subsequently to about 1955 unable to vote but many who voted then may have changed their minds. I have, for one! I voted NO then but I would vote YES now. It has become clear to me that it is only from within a more closely integrated Europe that we can hope to co-operate and, where appropriate compete, on equal terms with the Americas, and with the new still developing powers in the East. But is it about membership of the EU that the public should first be consulted? We have already had one referendum on this issue. Aren’t there other, even more important issues, about which the public has never been consulted. Do we really need those vastly expensive Trident submarines roaming the oceans, for instance? We have certainly never been consulted about them! That would be my first priority for a referendum. Then how about Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the USA? We have never been consulted about that – yet it has involved us in an illegal war in Iraq that cost hundreds of British and American and many thousand Iraqi lives, destroyed the infrastructure of a once prosperous nation and served as an effective recruitment inducement for international Islamic terrorism. And all because of a belief in weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist and a completely mistaken idea that Iraq was in some way connected with the outrage on 9/11! It has also involved us, with NATO (have we ever had a referendum on NATO membership?) in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, from which we hear news of fresh British casualties (the loss of some young woman’s husband or lover, some child’s Dad, some ageing couple’s beloved son) virtually every week. I reckon that our continued membership of the EU would be well down the list of subjects on which I would like a national referendum to be held.
I am not alone!
I have long believed that the Government places too much emphasis on benefit fraud and much too little on tax evasion and avoidance. It seems that I am far from being alone in this. Here is an extract from last week’s (25th March) Church Times, an authoritative Church of England newspaper with a readership by no means limited to Anglicans. ‘On Tuesday, the Methodist Union, the Baptist Union and the United Reformed Church (URC )issued a statement calling on the Chancellor “to apologise to benefit claimants” for using figures on last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review which inflated benefit fraud threefold and played down the levels of unpaid tax contrary to the Government’s own figures’. The Rev. Graham Sparkes, the Baptist Union’s head of faith and unity said “Let us be clear: the government’s own figures show that benefit fraud costs £1.6 billion – not £5 billion as he said in October – and unpaid tax costs £42 billion. Benefit fraud is clearly unacceptable but unpaid tax is obviously more damaging to our economy. The same issue of Church Times recorded that Church Action on Poverty c laimed that the Budget fell short of the promise to protect the poorest. ‘In April, the housing benefit and other welfare cuts will fall hard on the poorest people in our communities – people who did not cause this financial crisis, and are being made to pay the price for it’. The Church of England may be the ‘established church’ of this country but it is good to see that neither it, nor other Christian traditions, are in any sense the voice of ‘the Establishment’! Long may this remain so. Long may they remember that the mother of Jesus Christ proclaimed a God who, ‘Scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, put down the mighty from their seat, exalted the humble and meek, and filled the hungry with good things, while sending the rich empty away!’ Her son Jesus identified himself with the poor and said that anything that we do, either good or bad, to even the humblest of our fellow men and women, we are doing to him.
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