Tendring Topics…………on line
Tendring Careline
On
Sunday afternoon, 30th June, I was watching the tv in my
living/kitchen when a disembodied voice disturbed me. ‘Warning!’
it insisted, ‘the telephone is
disconnected’. It emanated from the
‘magic box’ of my Tendring Careline installation
sitting unobtrusively on the window-shelf of my sitting room. Tendring Careline is a district council
service that for over a quarter of a century has offered security to old or disabled
folk living on their own, I have been
signed on as one of its clients for two or three years and recommend it without
hesitation to people in a similar situation as myself.
My Careline (magic box)
Transmitter/Receiver
positioned on my window shelf. Beside it is my pendant – placed there solely
to be photographed. Two minutes after the photo had been taken it was round my
neck again!
The ‘magic box’ incorporates a
powerful microphone and loud speaker and is connected to the land-line
telephone system. With it comes a
plastic pendant with a red push-button that I wear round my neck at all times. Should I fall and be unable to get up, become
suddenly ill, or should there be any other emergency (a fire, a flood, an
intruder!), pressing that red button anywhere
in my bungalow and at any time of the day or night, will alert one of the round-the-clock staff at Careline’s Clacton headquarters who will
seek to reassure me and take immediate appropriate action. This might consist of phoning the police, the
ambulance service or the fire service or simply asking a neighbour who holds
the key to my bungalow to look in and give me a hand. On the outside wall beside my front door is a
‘key safe’ in which there is a key to front door accessible only by the use of
a code number that Careline would give
to the emergency service.
My
last week’s emergency wasn’t really urgent by Careline standards, but the fact that my telephone land-line wasn’t
working meant that my pressing that potentially life-saving red button would be
fruitless. I could have tried phoning
British Telecom myself on my mobile phone but I knew from experience that I’d
be answered by a mechanical voice with questions that I would be unable to
understand or answer - ‘Please enter your account number and press
one (or possibly 2 or 3) under this, that or the other circumstance’ – for
instance! I thought that if I phoned Tendring Helpline, I would at least
reach a helpful and sympathetic human voice – and that if they phoned BT they’d
carry more weight than an exasperated ninety-two year old could hope to.
I
was right on all counts. A very helpful
and sympathetic young lady replied to my call. She promised to phone BT on my
account and ring back to let me know the result. And so she did. Fifteen minutes later my mobile phone rang and
she told me that BT had several disconnections in my area and that mine would
be fixed before lunch time the next day.
It didn’t happen quite like that. Monday lunch time came and went. The land-line phone was still out of action.
At about 3.00 pm I phoned Careline again
and a different, but equally helpful and sympathetic young lady assured me that
she’d ring BT again and urge them to regard my re-connection as urgent.
Just before 10.00
pm I thought that I heard a click from my land-line phone. I lifted the receiver – and there was the
familiar and very welcome dialling tone!
I immediately went into the sitting room, pressed that red button on the
pendant round my neck (it was after 10.00 pm by then but it is a 24 hour service), told the Careline
operator who answered me that all
was now well, and asked her to pass on my thanks to her colleagues. ‘Just
part of the Tendring Careline Service’, she replied. It was really quite a
tiny crisis – but to a nonagenarian living alone, even tiny crises can seem
enormous.
I
do recommend the Careline service to
elderly folk living alone, particularly those who have a degree of
disability. The address of Tendring Careline is Barnes House, Pier Avenue , Clacton-on-Sea ,
CO15 1NJ
Blog
readers who live elsewhere in the UK than in the Tendring District
will almost certainly find that there is a similar scheme in their area, run
either by the local authority or a private firm. World-wide, I really don’t know the position.
A lone Lib-Dem Voice
The
parliamentary progress of Colchester ’s
Lib.Dem. MP Sir Bob Russell is always of interest. If I were a Colchester
voter his general support for the Lib/Con coalition government would prevent me
from giving him my vote – but I admire the way in which he speaks his mind and
is quite prepared to be in a minority of one when his conscience and/or common
sense demand it.
He,
alone among Lib.Dem members of parliament, voted against the proposed
high-speed rail link between London
and the North. I – and I note many
readers of the local Gazette – am
sure that he was right to do so. This
proposed rail link is a ‘prestige project that will inevitably take longer and
cost more than is currently estimated.
When completed it will be possible to travel ‘up north’ rather more
quickly than is possible by rail at present – though less quickly and rather
more expensively than by air!
Meanwhile
the same government that is proposing to lavish millions of pounds of our money on this project, is cutting
yet again their grants to local authorities; money badly needed, among other
things, to fill in our potholed roads and repair our worn, broken and dangerous
pavements.
I
am reminded of a story recounted by H.G. Wells of a visit to Russia in the
years immediately after the revolution and civil war. Looking across the Red Square in Moscow he
saw an enormous building with a gigantic banner draped across it on which, in
Russian Cyrillic capitals, was blazoned the message; ‘INSTITUTE FOR THE ELECTRIFICATION OF ALL THE
RUSSIAS!’
Walking across the
Square to this imposing building he found beside the entrance, a small notice,
also of course in Russian; ‘Bell
‘Certainly
tries very hard’
That, I think, would be
the words I would write on a report about Michael Gove’s progress as Education
Minister in the present coalition government.
He really does try to produce an educational system from which Britain’s
sixteen-to-eighteen year olds can emerge literate, numerate, with at least a
rudimentary acquaintance with science, the history and geography of the world
and in particular their own country, a familiarity with their own country’s
literature and some knowledge of at least one foreign language. It seems a great deal, but then the
educational system does have 13 years in which to achieve that end, and they
are the 13 years in which our ability to learn is at its highest. More recently Mr Gove has set himself a
rather more modest task; that of teaching the Civil Servants of the Department
of Education to write literate, straightforward and grammatical letters and
reports. That surely doesn’t seem too
much to ask. He has circulated a
memorandum containing ten points that they should observe when composing such a
piece of prose.
Some
of the advice is unquestionably very sound.
When in doubt, cut it out. Read it
out loud – if it sounds wrong don’t send it. The
more a letter reads like a political speech the less good it is as a letter.
Would your mum understand that word, phrase or sentence? Would mine? Isn’t that just a little
patronising? My mum (born in 1888) left
a village school to go ‘into service’ at the age of 12. As an adult she could write literate,
grammatical and correctly spelt letters, had a knowledge of history and
geography greater than that of many school leavers today, and she was familiar
with the plots, and several of the speeches, of some of Shakespeare’s best-known
plays. Other advice that I would have
added would have been: Try to write short sentences. If a long sentence can be made into two short ones, do it. Short paragraphs are also to be preferred. A
large unparagraphed block of print discourages the reader. Try to begin the letter ‘Dear Mr Smith’ or
whatever. We all like our own name and
we all hate being addressed as ‘Dear Sir or Madam’.
Mr
Gove suggests too that to improve their own prose his staff should read the
work of great writers, suggesting George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen,
George Eliot, Matthew Parris and Christopher Hitchens. I’d certainly agree with George Orwell, Jane
Austen and George Eliot, but how about Charlotte Bronte? Parris and
Hitchens are both political writers. I’d
suggest replacing them with P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, creator of
‘private eye’ Philip Marlowe. They were
both educated at Dulwich
College
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