Week 37.2011 20.9.2011

Tendring Topics…….on line


‘I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree’


So claimed American poetess Joyce Kilmer. I think that she was comparing chalk with cheese. What is indisputable though is that trees have inspired poets through the ages. They enhance the appearance and charm of the countryside, mop up some of the carbon dioxide that is produced by human activities and help to prevent soil erosion and flooding. They provide a safe haven, breeding ground and food supply for myriad forms of animal and plant life, as well as shade, recreational facilities, fuel and building materials for we humans.



In my back garden are two apple trees (in blossom) a damson tree, a Japanese winter-flowering cherry and four silver birches.  I do try to practise what I preach!

 Between 1974 and 1980, while I was Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I remember that the Trees Working Party, under the chairmanship of tree enthusiast Councillor Malcolm Holloway, was one of the Council’s most successful working groups. Completely non-political, the Working Party encouraged tree planting as a condition of new housing, commercial or industrial development, and helped to preserve existing trees on public land by enlisting volunteer spare-time tree wardens throughout the district to report acts of vandalism and to water local street trees in times of drought. I recall that we organised a children’s essay competition on the importance of trees to humankind. This was judged by the editor of the East Essex Gazette (now the Clacton Gazette) and certificates and small prizes were presented to the winner and runners up. The Dutch Elm Disease epidemic was at its peak during the late 1970s. The Working Party made the public aware of this threat to the English countryside and encouraged replacement of diseased trees. At that time the Council had a ‘tree nursery’ on land beside Holland Brook near the Thorpe-le-Soken sewage treatment works. On it ‘tree whips’ were grown into saplings ready to be planted out in public places. This received publicity both in the local and regional press and on tv.

The Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s reign occurred during those years and I believe that Chairman Malcolm Holloway was the first to coin the slogan Plant a Tree for the Jubilee! that was later widely used nation-wide. If he were alive today I am sure that he would be delighted by the fact that the Woodland Trust intends to plant six million trees in Britain to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. The biggest proposed tree-planting project is for a 4,600 acres area in Leicestershire, but there are other less ambitious schemes planned throughout the UK, which at present is said to have proportionately the lowest area of woodland of any country in Europe.

I wish the campaign every success. I wonder though how it will fit in with the government’s determination to speed up the granting of planning permission for new development by watering down local authorities’ already limited powers of veto, and creating a presumption of approval for proposed development. This it is hoped will lead to more homes and more jobs? I have a feeling that woodland will not be allowed to stand in the way of developers’ profits and that, despite lip service to ‘localism’ the government will override local objections to wholesale tree felling.

In this connection I was interested to learn from a national newspaper that three government ministers, the Chancellor of the Chequer among them, while endorsing the government’s relaxation of planning legislation nationally, are strongly supporting local protests against unwelcome development their own constituency areas!

NIMBY!

Unemployment

The latest unemployment figures – another 80,000 jobless during the past three months bringing the total number of unemployed to two and a half million, seem to have come as a total surprise to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Regular readers of this blog will not have expected me to be surprised. Drastic cuts in the public services are just beginning to have their effect. There will be worse to come.

Nor was I surprised to note that the Private Sector had been quite unable to find work for those made jobless in the Public Sector. Much Public Sector work is contracted out to private consultants and contractors. What’s more, the Public Sector provides an environment in which private firms can thrive and make their profits.

They are the people who repair and keep litter-free the roads and pavements along which everyone comes to work. They take away and dispose of domestic and commercial waste. They try to maintain law and order. They maintain a healthy and pollution free environment. They make sure that our food is fit to eat and that our restaurants, pubs and cafes are safe places in which to eat it. They care for and treat the sick and injured. They help struggling mothers with young babies and old folk even more helpless than I am!

Did you notice that when ‘the west’ wanted to get Libya on its feet again and out of the chaos produced by months of civil war – nobody said, ‘We must get that casino, those night-clubs and that race course on their feet again to create some wealth‘ or even, ‘We must get the supermarkets, the factories and the oil pipe lines in operation as a first priority’. Not a bit of it. Their first task was to pay the public servants who hadn’t been paid for months. Only when law and order had been restored, and the essential health and environmental services brought back into operation, could they begin to think of getting the private sector enterprises working again. The public sector provides the foundation on which modern society is built. It is not an optional extra. It is neglected at our peril.

Incidentally, just as in Scotland there was none of the recent rioting that afflicted England, neither has there been a rise in unemployment. On the contrary ‘north of the border’ there has been a reduction in unemployment. This is because the devolved Scottish government has embarked on a programme of public works and has thus created much-needed jobs.

This, so our government insists, is the road to ruin. We shall see. In the meantime the Scots may have to cope with increasing numbers of white Anglo-Saxon economic migrants from ‘down south’!


Tuberculosis stages a comeback!

A recent news item on the radio (I think it must have been on the BBC World Service) sent cold shivers down my spine. Tuberculosis, so the newsreader said, was again beginning to become widespread, thanks to the development of strains of the Tuberculosis Bacillus that were resistant to all known antibiotics My own acquaintance with that one-time killer disease that we all thought had been tamed for good, was in 1948. I was 25 and my wife Heather 23. We had been married just two years. During the previous, very hard, winter she had had two or three bouts of what had appeared to be ‘flu. bed rest and aspirin had been prescribed and she had slowly recovered her health, but not her strength, on each occasion. In the late summer of 1948 she had another attack – and this time aspirin and bed rest didn’t help. She had a persistent cough. Her voice became husky. Her temperature was abnormally high in the evening and low in the morning. She perspired heavily at night, had no appetite, had lost her strength and was visibly losing weight. X-ray and sputum tests revealed that she had a severe tubercular infection of the larynx and left lung. The prognosis was not good. She was admitted to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester. For several weeks her condition deteriorated and I was in despair.


Heather had to gain a stone in weight before she could go to Papworth for surgery. She had just achieved that aim when this pcture was taken at Nayland Sanatorum.

The new ‘wonder drug’ streptomycin had just appeared on the scene. It was expensive and in short supply. It was given only to patients who were very ill indeed but not beyond all hope. Heather fell into that category. Her right lung had never been affected and that made recovery a possibility. A course of streptomycin was supplemented by P.A.S (para-aminosalicylic acid) and the  partial collapse of the left lung by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space below the diaphragm, a pneumo-peritoneum (PP). ( How extraordinary that I can remember these medical terms after half a century but can’t remember the name of someone I was talking to this morning!)

It worked! Heather’s larynx healed and the progress of the disease in the left lung was halted.. To complete the healing process the left lung had to be permanently collapsed. This was achieved during an eight weeks stay in Papworth Hospital, then a centre for TB treatment. In three separate operations, each a fortnight apart, eight of Heather’s ribs were removed (an eight-rib thoracoplasty) and the diseased lung collapsed. The operation was a success. Heather gradually regained her strength and her appetite. She was discharged cured (well, as cured as she would ever be) in time for Christmas 1950.


It had been a life-saving operation.  It had also been a crippling one. Heather had, in effect, just one fully operational lung. She had to rest for an hour or so every afternoon. I always had to help her with shopping and with heavy work about the house. ‘Evenings out’ were too much for her. Our guests, for whom she never spared herself, didn't know how exhausted she was on their departure.  When, in her seventies, she developed osteoporosis, the absence of supporting ribs increased the spinal curvature that developed..




Heather happily camping in the 1970s

Heather wasn’t one to moan and groan. She gave me two fine sons who, in their turn, gave us three wonderful grandchildren of all of whom we had every reason to be proud. She was a good and untiring cook, an expert with the needle and with the sewing machine and a great make-do-and-mender! She enjoyed life too though her physical activities were limited. She was hardly an ‘outdoor girl’ but she thoroughly enjoyed the camping holidays that we took every year.

No one could have had a better wife, nor could our sons have had a more loving and supportive mother. Yet sometimes I find myself thinking how different her life could have been had the full potential of antibiotics been realized a few years earlier and she had been spared the crippling operation that had cured her tuberculosis - but at a heavy price!

That is why I experienced a shock when I heard that Tuberculosis was staging a comeback – and that the bacillus had now developed a resistance to all existing antibiotics.

Week No. 37.10 14th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Prophetic Topics?

Hardly; the fact that likely future events mentioned in this blog often actually occur a week or so later, doesn’t mean that I have the gift of second sight. It is simply that the probable result of some political actions is blindingly obvious to anyone endowed with common sense, devoid of party dogma and immune to the headlines of the popular press.

I wrote, some time ago, that since much of the private sector depends upon the public sector for its work, savage cuts in the public sector were likely to affect private firms before their public authority customers. And so it has. Recently I learned that 5,000 small private firms, contractors of services to local authorities, were already in financial difficulties. The private and public sectors were, I said, like conjoined twins – whatever, good or bad, is done to one of them will inevitably affect the other.

That was just small contractors. Now we learn that the division of the giant building maintenance organisation Connaught, that deals with the upkeep of social housing countrywide, is in financial trouble with thousands of job losses. That is just the immediate result of the cuts. The other, and less easily remedied, effect will be neglected repair and regular maintenance and the descent of social housing into irredeemable slums.

On a recent tv news programme the presenter asked randomly selected members of the public if they would prefer the government to try to reduce ‘the deficit’ by cutting benefits, or services. Most, no doubt inspired by press headlines about ‘benefit cheats’, unhesitatingly replied ‘benefits’ – until they were reminded that ‘benefits’ included child allowances, rent and tax rebates, retirement pensions, free tv licences, bus passes, winter fuel allowance and so on. Many of those interviewed imagined that ‘benefits’ just meant large sums of money paid to ‘other people’ the majority whom were layabouts and/or cheats.

A very great many people (I am among them) are in receipt of some kind of benefit. It can’t be too strongly stressed that, just as the vast majority of young people are not violent drunken hooligans, and the vast majority of Muslims have no sympathy whatsoever with terrorists, the vast majority of people in receipt of benefit are not cheats.

What should have been asked was, would you prefer the government to reduce the deficit by cutting benefits and services to the public, or by modest increases in direct taxes such as income tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax?

Cutting services, reducing benefits and increasing indirect taxes like VAT and excise duties on such items as tobacco, alcohol and petrol, disproportionately penalise the poor. Income tax rises would affect a wide swathe of society from some with relatively low incomes (they would certainly affect me!) to the seriously wealthy. They would claw back some of the ‘benefits’ from those who didn’t need them and – by their very nature – they are only demanded from those who are able to pay them.

Funny thing, the idea of an extra penny in the pound on the standard rate of income tax, which would reduce no one to penury but would raise a great deal of money, appears not even to have been considered.

I would find it easier to accept all this stuff from the present Chancellor about belt tightening, what the country can and cannot afford, and how we all shall have to suffer, if I could only forget that, just a year or two ago he and Lord Mandelson (then a Labour Government Minister) were together enjoying the hospitality of a multi-millionaire on his luxury yacht. I wonder how much discomfort, never mind suffering, their then host will have to suffer?

Clacton’s Water Feature is back

Recently I expressed my regret at the fact that Clacton’s much criticised and crisis-ridden water feature seemed to have been turned off forever. It had had a short ‘normal’ life during which it had brightened up the town centre. On warm days adventurous children had plunged through its jets to the entertainment of passers by. Sadly though, it appeared that by doing so they were risking their health and safety. The feature didn’t have an adequate water purification plant. Goodness knows what dire pollution may not have been introduced into the ever-circulating water by stray cats, dogs and passing seagulls!


Last summer it made a brief appearance behind a steel fence, intended to protect those of the younger generation from their own bravado. It was anything but an asset to the town centre. Amid universal derision the fence was removed and the jets switched off. This year the Council brought cutting-edge electronic wizardry to its aid. There was no fence. The water feature was switched on - but if any one, adult or child, approached too close to the jets, they faded and died. Sadly, some of the younger generation discovered a blind spot in the defences and a way through the metaphorical minefield. Once again they endangered their health by venturing through the jets. The feature was again switched off. This time I feared, for good.

I’m glad to say that, by means beyond my understanding, the blind spot no longer exists. The path through the minefield has been successfully blocked. The jets of the water feature have been restored. Unless there has been another catastrophe since I took this photo (on 9th Sept.), they are happily jetting away now!
Power to the People!

Last week in this blog I commented on what seemed to me to be two totally outrageous ideas suggested by the Policy Exchange ‘think tank’ to alleviate Britain’s housing crisis. They involved bribing members of rural communities to vote against their own instincts in proposed referenda on whether or not development should take place in their villages; and seizing the thousands of homes provided and run by Housing Associations, using their rent to build more houses for sale.

I said that although I understood Policy Exchange to be an organisation close to the government, I felt sure that both David Cameron and Nick Clegg had more common sense and integrity than to think seriously about adopting either of these (currently criminal!) ideas. Now……..I am beginning to wonder.

Policy Exchange’s report has evidently reached Whitehall. This morning on tv I heard a government spokesman explain that among the problems afflicting would-be developers were long delays in the current planning procedures. They would prepare and submit their plans for housing estates, supermarkets and so on. The district or borough council concerned would consider these plans. They might be passed, passed subject to conditions, or rejected. If they were rejected or it was considered that the conditions were unreasonable, the Developer could appeal – Central Government would become involved and the procedure might drag on for months.

This, as the spokesman said, was clearly unsatisfactory. It might have thought that a government devoted to ‘giving power to local communities’ would decide that, to speed up the process, there should be no appeal for most proposed developments. The decision of the democratically elected district council, taken in consultation with the parish or town council where there was one, should be final. I say most proposed developments because if it were a universal rule, there would be no refuse disposal plant, no sewage works, no penal institutions and no provision for ‘travellers’ anywhere. These are developments that most of us agree are essential but none of us want in our backyards!

That was not the solution favoured by the government spokesman. He suggested that decisions should be passed to local communities and decided by a public referendum, adding that it might be possible to provide ‘inducements’ for the local community to accept the development! His words could have, and possibly did, come straight from the Policy Exchange report.

As it happens just such a development as the government spokesman had in mind is being considered within the Tendring District at this moment.

The owners of St Osyth Priory, a historic stately home in a picturesque and historic village had, to the villagers’ consternation, proposed the building of 200 homes on their land. They were to be part of a scheme needed to raise millions of pounds to restore the Estate. Even more recently that number has been doubled, increasing the number of proposed new houses to 400 This, say the villagers, would increase the number of homes in the village by 50 percent, totally altering the community’s character!

I was particularly interested in this proposed development because in 1974, in the immediate wake of the local government reorganisation of that year, Mr Colin Bellows, the then-new Tendring District Council’s Engineer and Surveyor and I, as Public Relations Officer had visited every town and parish council in the district to familiarise their members with the responsibilities of those local councils under the new Act of Parliament.

I spoke about the newly formed District Council, serving the whole of the Tendring Peninsula, and its relationship with parish and town councils. Mr Bellows explained the new planning laws. These for the first time gave such councils the power to examine and comment on the plans of any proposed new development in their area, before the Tendring Council, as Planning Authority, made its decision.

It was thirty-five years ago and there is only one of those meetings that remains in my memory. It was in the village hall in St. Osyth. An elderly parish councillor had stood up and expressed his regret that we had wasted our time coming to see them. ‘St. Osyth’, he said, ‘already has all the development that is needed and the parish council is opposed to any more whatsoever’.

It seems that that old gentleman’s spirit lives on today. An unofficial poll of local residents taken by the Save our St. Osyth Group after the earlier proposal to build just 200 new homes, revealed that 90 percent of villagers objected to the scheme. Now that the proposed number of homes has been doubled, I would expect there to be even more objectors.

I reckon that it would take a pretty hefty inducement to make that lot change their minds!

The Paradox of Life

The September issue of the Southern East Anglian Area Quakers’ newsletter contains quotations from ‘The Mahabharata’ on life’s paradoxes. Reality, the quotations insist, is composed of opposites. To assert the one is to assert its opposite as well.

Here are a few examples: The paradox of having is that the more one has the greater is one’s discontent. There is a paradox of limits – one becomes aware of one’s limits only by transgressing them; there is no known way by which one can know one’s own limits in advance and The paradox of the self is that without the other, the self would be inconceivable.

These made me remember some paradoxical thoughts on happiness that have developed in my mind over what is now a very long life.

Those who spend their lives seeking their own happiness are destined never to find it.

We realize how happy we have been only when we are happy no longer.

It is our happiest memories that are most likely to bring us to tears