Week 51.2011 29.12.2011

Tendring Topics........on Line

Paying for ‘Sid’s Free Lunch’

            British children of the 1920s and ‘30s learned at an early age that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  We were all familiar with the politically incorrect nursery rhyme about Simon, a young man with learning difficulties, who encountered a seller of pies on his way to a fair.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘May I taste your ware?

Said the pieman to Simple Simon, ‘Show me first your penny’.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘Indeed I haven’t any’.

            And poor Simon went hungry.

            It was a message that in the ‘80s the then Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, would have whole-heartedly endorsed.  If I close my eyes I can almost hear her well-bred but somewhat strident voice:  ‘Wealth is a product of hard work and enterprise.  There is no such thing as a free lunch’.

            How strange therefore that it should have been during her period of office (in fact as a result of her initiative) that thousands of Britons came to the conclusion that there was such a thing as a free lunch after all.  I was reminded of this a week or so ago when a radio programme announced that the year nearing its end had seen the twenty-fifth anniversary of the then government’s privatisation of British Gas, the first of a series of similar privatisations of state enterprises.

            Towards the end of 1986 there was a brilliant sales campaign (do you remember it?) in which we were all asked to ‘Tell Sid’ about the forthcoming sale of British Gas shares.  Well, thousands did, and resold their shares later at a very comfortable profit.  This was repeated with other privatisations though resale didn’t always realize enormous profits.  

            It struck me as very odd at the time.  I remember writing in Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express that I had been quite persuaded that wealth was the product of hard work and enterprise and that there was no such thing as a free lunch.  Whose hard work and enterprise was it then, I asked, that had produced the profits realized by those who had been astute enough to buy – and then resell – those privatisation shares?

            The fact is, of course, that no extra wealth had been created.  Not a cubic inch of extra gas had been produced.  It had all been simply a paper transaction. I believe though that it was those and similar paper transactions (the deregulation of financial services, the transformation of Building Societies into banks and so on), over which Mrs Thatcher presided in the avaricious ‘80s, that are at the root of our current financial problems. You can ‘tell Sid’, if you encounter him, that the poor, the old, the disabled and the unemployed are today having to pay for all those ‘free lunches’ of a quarter of a century ago!

 Is ‘our Dave’ the only one in step?

          Many years ago there was a magazine cartoon showing a mum and her daughter watching a platoon of soldiers marching past.  The daughter was proudly pointing to one of the soldiers.  ‘Eh Mum, look at our Jim.  He’s the only one in step!’

         I remembered that cartoon (I think it must have been in an old copy of Punch) when I read the press headlines about our Prime Minister being alone in declining to sign up to a new treaty of the willing to sacrifice a small part of our national sovereignty to ensure a united economic Europe in the face of the economic blizzard that we are all facing.  He had already threatened to veto any amendment to the European Treaty to achieve the same end.

               Mr Cameron had been urged by his Europhobic Conservative colleagues to ‘stand up for Britain’ and ‘show the bulldog spirit’.  They had clearly forgotten (or perhaps were not old enough to remember) that Winston Churchill, the very epitome of British independence and the bulldog spirit’, had been a supporter of the idea of a United States of Europe in which Britain would play a leading role.  He had wanted to inspire and lead our fellow Europeans – not turn tail and run away from them!

            Whether we like it or not, Britain is part of Europe – geographically, historically and culturally.  Our ultimate destiny, I have little doubt, is for us to fulfil Churchill’s dream and to become not the leader but a leader of a Europe politically and economically united. As it is the 26 participating European states form a powerful political and economic unit.  It would have been that much more powerful had it included the United Kingdom as the 27^th. Before signing the American Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin is said to have declared, ‘If we do not now hang together then we shall assuredly hang separately’.  It could be that the same is true of Europe today.

            I hope, by the way, that the Parliamentary Europhobes do not imagine that that the ‘special relationship’ will ensure that the USA stands by us in our self-imposed isolation.  The USA acts always in its own interests (why on earth should it do otherwise?)   During the Cold War period Britain was the USA’s unsinkable aircraft carrier.  More recently we have provided the USA with a foothold into Europe.  I fear that, as far as the USA is concerned, Mr Cameron may well have made the United Kingdom redundant.

            By ‘opting out’ David Cameron has certainly earned a place in history.  Will it be as Britain’s liberator, who cast off the shackles of Brussels, secured the UK’s independence and led us on to financial security and prosperity?   Or will it be as the bungler who drove the final nail into the coffins of both the European Union and the UK; the politician who sacrificed British industry for the sake of the very financial institutions that had led us to financial ruin, and sacrificed his country for the sake of the unity of his political party? 

            I am not at all sure that I want to live long enough to find out!

  A Look Back at 2011

          For Great Britain, Europe and the World, 2011 has been a pretty disastrous year.  There have been earthquakes and tsunamis, devastating monsoon floods and, elsewhere, disastrous droughts.  There have been nuclear contamination fears.   The great depression, out of which we seemed to be slowly emerging before the last General Election, has again deepened.   So far our government’s attempts to lower the financial deficit have only made things worse. Several Governments within the Eurozone are threatened with bankruptcy. Efforts to remedy the situation, plus the incurable Europhobia from which a great many of our MPs suffer, have resulted in a two-tier European Union, with the UK alone and isolated on the lower tier. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, thousands have been rendered homeless.  Meanwhile Climatic Change (progressing virtually unimpeded due to international failure to agree effective counter action) threatens to make our self-made financial crises look like Sunday-school picnics!

            For me though, on a personal level, 2011 has been quite different.   It has been the year in which I have celebrated my 90^th birthday and in which family events have made it a year to remember. It has been a year on which I can look back with quiet satisfaction.

            First, on 23^rd April was the same-sex wedding of my beautiful granddaughter Jo to her partner Siobhan.  It was an event to which I had looked forward with some trepidation – not least because I anticipated that I would be the oldest (probably by as much as 25 years!) of the hundred-or so guests and I had promised to say a few words during the course of the partnership ceremony.

            It turned out to be a loving and dignified occasion of which I have warm memories.  I shared with the other guests Shakespeare’s sonnet beginning, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment……’ and a piece of wisdom that I had acquired from a German daily tear-off calendar while I had been a POW.  ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’  (To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune that there is on earth).

            A month later was my 90^th birthday and I celebrated it with my two sons and daughters in law, two of my grandchildren (Chris – the third – lives and works in Taiwan) and my younger son’s girlfriend Romy; eight of us in all, together with my German friends in Zittau, the small town in Germany where I was  POW from 1943 – ’45.

Highlights of the occasion were our champagne reception by the Mayor of Zittau in the Town Hall, my being presented with a splendid certificate confirming my honorary membership of the Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils, and the celebratory dinner that I hosted at our hotel for my family, my German friends, the Mayor of Zittau (Herr Arndt Voight) and his wife and other local VIPs.

Accordion Orchestra.. In the background is the great Lenten Veil. 

 I remember equally warmly though, the spontaneity of the welcome I received from a local twenty-strong piano-accordion orchestra in the museum/church of the Holy Cross where the Lenten Veil, in whose history I played a tiny role, is on permanent display.  They entered playing When the saints come marching in, and gave us a concert of eight or ten folk or light classical items beginning with the European Anthem, Schiller’s Ode to Joy, ­and ending with Happy Birthday To You played with real gusto!

I also remember with great  pleasure a final celebratory family meal that we had together on the last evening of our visit to Zittau.  It was in Zum Alten Sack, a character-filled hostelry in the centre of the town just a few yards from the site of the building (now demolished) where we had the temporary ‘POW Barracks’ in which I lived from October 1943 till May 1945.  Younger son Andy is missing from the picture as he was holding the camera.

         
                Towards the end of the year we also learned that my younger grandson Nick (almost excluded from the photo above!) had been appointed Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, a non-profit making organisation that has the purpose of attracting tourists from the rest of the world to Europe.  He is only ‘Acting’ Director.  Whether he will apply for and be offered the permanent post, remains to be seen.  In the meantime he is, while still only 28, gaining valuable experience at the top-most level of public administration.

            For my family and I 2011 certainly had some memorable moments!  What, I wonder, will 2012 bring?

           

Week 19 2011 17th May 2011

Tendring Topics……on line


Fourscore years and ten?


According to Psalm 90 ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow’. During my childhood and youth that seemed pretty reasonable to me. The years stretched far ahead of me – seventy (threescore years and ten) was almost unbelievably distant. I could well imagine that those who made it to eighty (fourscore years) would be so weary and infirm that they would wish that they hadn’t.

Prior to World War II I had never personally known anyone who had reached that age. I do remember my mother pointing out a particularly feeble member of the church we attended and saying, in accents of wonder ‘He’s nearly eighty you know!’


My father died of a coronary thrombosis in 1939, at the age of 57. That was young, though not so young as to cause particular surprise in those days. My mother, born in 1888, made it to within a fortnight of her ninetieth birthday.


The Hall family in 1922



It startles me to realize that I have already done better (if that’s the word) than that. I was born on 18th May 1921. So, if I post this blog as I intend, on Monday 16th May, it will be just a couple of days before my 90th birthday – when I shall be fourscore years and ten!


The Zittau Great Lenten Veil on display in the Museum Chush of the Holy Cross























I really must try to make it, because my immediate family – sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren (only they’re no longer children!) are doing their best to make sure that it is a very special birthday. I am going back to Zittau, the small town in eastern Germany where, as a PoW, I spent the final eighteen months of World War II, to celebrate my 90th anniversary with my family and my German friends. It will be the fourth time that I have been to Zittau as a free man. Some members of my family have already been there with me but this time they will all have the opportunity of meeting my German friends and seeing Zittau’s unique Great Lenten Veil with its 90 pictures from the Bible, 45 from the Old Testament and 45 from the New. It is the town’s pride and joy, and it was my quite inadvertent and accidental part in its five and a half century history that first ensured my welcome on my return to that small German town on the borders of both Poland and the Czech Republic.

I hope to be able to tell blog readers all about this latest and surely final visit. I may not be able to do so next week, as I shall be staying in Zittau until Sunday May 22nd and will probably not return to Clacton in time to prepare and post a blog on the 23rd or 24th.

Looking back over the two decades that have elapsed since I passed the threescore years and ten mark I certainly can’t claim that, as the psalmist suggests, they have been nothing but ‘labour and sorrow’. Until I was seventy I had never used a computer. Previously I had used a manual typewriter for all my writing. Since then, I have discovered the joys (and the frustrations) of the internet. I have hundreds of photographs on display on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea organised by my older grandson. My younger grandson fixed me up first with a blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and then with my own website www.ernesthall.net. I have been posting ‘Tendring Topics….on line’ on both of these for the past three years.

My wife Heather and I both lived to see our two sons establish themselves in their careers and our three grandchildren grow up into fine young adults, all three of them graduating at university (we had considered ourselves privileged to have stayed on at school till we were sixteen while most of our contemporaries had been thrown on to the labour market at fourteen!)

It wasn’t all plain sailing. From about 2,002 Heather’s health began to decline and I took on more and more of the tasks about the house. Eventually she became almost totally disabled and for two years I was her sole carer. I didn’t leave her side except for essential shopping and so on, and only then if I had left her watching a tv programme or DVD that she would enjoy. Those last two years were by no means all doom and gloom. We were quietly happy together and, in some ways, it was the most satisfying and fulfilling time of my life. Her life came to an end almost five years ago, three months after we had celebrated our diamond (60th) wedding anniversary at a meeting of thanksgiving at our Quaker Meeting House. All our friends and all members of our extended family were present.

Heather - as many will remember her

Since Heather’s death my family and friends have helped me to fill my life. It has been during those years that my Flickr site, blogspot and website have been established. I have made three visits to Zittau, several to Brussels to see my younger grandson, and to Sheffield to see my granddaughter who is a social worker attached to the renal department of a large teaching hospital. With her, and my son and daughter-in-law, I have seen something of the Peak District. I have acquired an electric mobility scooter with which I am able to attend Quaker Meetings, services at St. James’s Anglican Church and a weekday service and coffee morning at the local United Reformed Church.

The interior of Clacton’s Quaker Meeting House. An important part of Heather’s and my life for over fifty years.

I have revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England as well as retaining my membership of the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) of which both Heather and I had been members since 1948. And – in a few days time - I hope to be celebrating my ninetieth birthday with my family and German friends.

Most people would, I suppose, consider that (for my age!) I continue to live a pretty full and active life. To myself though (especially when sleepless at two in the morning!) I am just filling in time, turning over, and enjoying, the colourful pages of the glossy magazines strewn on the table of God’s Waiting Room.

Sun, Sea and Sand – and 'The Case of the Missing Beach!'


The last really hot, dry summer that we had on the Essex Sunshine Coast was in 2006, five years ago. Since then, although we have had hot, sunny summer days, we have also had grey, chilly ones with strong winds and more rain than we expect. We haven’t had, as we had five years ago, day after day of hot, dry sunny weather.

Will 2011 prove to be as good as, even better perhaps, than 2006? We are still in the spring but the auguries are good. A cold, windy and often wet Easter had become almost traditional – and it really didn’t seem to matter whether it was a year in which Easter was ‘early’ or ‘late’; but not this year! It was warm and sunny throughout the Easter holiday where I was, up in the Peak District, and I’m told it was just the same back here on the sunshine coast. On my return to Clacton we had a few days of bitter northeast winds blowing in off the sea but now, as we approach mid-May we have gentle breezes and summer sunshine again. The solar panel on my roof is working overtime, supplying me with free hot water!

Everything seems to have conspired for our benefit. Always we have a plethora of public holidays in the spring when the weather on the southern East Anglian coast is rarely at its best. This year we had an extra one of those early spring holidays – and the weather was perfect for it! I have been to the sea front on several occasions recently and once onto the pier and on each occasion there seemed to be crowds of happy shoppers and visitors. I’d be surprised if Clacton's tills haven’t been ringing merrily!

A natural feature of our Sunshine Coast of which we have every reason to be proud is the quality of our beaches. Compare our miles of tide-washed golden sand with the shingle and pebbles of other east coast resorts like Felixstowe and Southwold, and such famous south coast resorts as Brighton and Eastbourne. No wonder William the Conqueror stumbled and fell when, in 1066, he leapt from his invading landing craft onto the pebbled beach of Pevensey Bay!

Nature has been generous to us and Tendring Council deserve credit for having done their bit to complement nature. Blue flags, prestigious standards of European excellence fly proudly over Clacton’s Martello Beach, Brightlingsea Beach and the Beach at Dovercourt Bay. Quality control awards from the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, denoting freedom from litter and a safe environment, have gone to beaches at Frinton, Walton and Harwich as well as to those that have been awarded a blue flag.

A sad exception is Holland-on-Sea, once as proud as any of its safe and sandy beaches but which quite suddenly finds that part of some of them has disappeared almost overnight. Mrs Read, a Clacton mother of two who exercises her dogs and whose children play on Holland Haven beach is reported as saying, ‘We were there at Easter and there was plenty of sand’. Now, she says that the beach is no longer there. So much sand has gone that steps leading down from the promenade would no longer reach the beach – if there were any! ‘You can’t get down them’, says Mrs Read, ‘but you wouldn’t want to anyway, because there’s no beach there any more……..it’s just rubble, estuary mud and bits of metal sticking out of the ground’.

In response the Council has closed two sections of beach – almost a third of a mile between Hazlemere Road Car Park and the Queensway toilets and about 300 ft at Holland Haven.

The Council blames the disappearing sand on heavy onshore winds over several days and says that it can only wait for the tides to deposit fresh sand. Council Leader Neil Stock says that, ‘This loss of beach has been caused by nature and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it’ which is not a thought that brings much consolation to beach hut owners. Mrs Read says, ‘A beach doesn’t just disappear without a reason. Beach hut owners pay the council hundreds of pounds, but having a beach hut, sort of implies that there should be a beach’.

‘Neither a borrower, nor a lender be…..’


This was the advice given by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet but it seems that it is only the second part of that advice that is the message to us from our government today. Increased tuition fees force debt on university students, and continuing record low interest rates plus rising inflation encourage borrowers and do nothing to hasten the clearance of their debts. Meanwhile those same low interest rates discourage savers and impoverish those who rely on their savings to augment their meagre incomes.

I suppose it couldn’t be all part of a cunning government plan to transfer the nation’s debt (incurred not by the last New Labour Government and the ‘public sector’ but by the cupidity and incompetence of the financial division of the private sector) from the government to us as individuals!