Week 4 2012

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


‘When the Bon Marché was shuttered…….’

            ……..When the feet were hot and tired,

           Outside Charringtons we waited, by the STOP HERE WHEN REQUIRED’

            So wrote the late Sir John Betjeman in his poem Parliament Hill Fields, a graphic evocation of part of the London scene of days gone by.  Sadly it seems that Clacton’s Bon Marché in Pier Avenue may soon be closing its shutters for good as its parent company Peacocks is threatened by the current financial crisis and is endeavouring to sell off its long-established satellite.

            The Peacock Group, like the country as a whole and many of its inhabitants, is seriously in debt.  A spokesman for the Group is quoted as saying that the board and its advisors have been discussing possible restructuring with its creditors. No agreement has been reached but discussions with other possible investors are taking place. He added ominously, ‘To protect the business while discussions with such investors are going on, the directors of the Peacock Group have filed a notice of intention to appoint an administrator’.

            Compared with many other towns Clacton-on-Sea hasn’t done too badly during the past few years.  The gap left by the closure of Woolworths and that left by the closure of the Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road have both been filled, though in each case with less prestigious enterprises employing fewer people than their predecessors.   The much-criticised re-design of the town centre has, I think, been found attractive by visitors, though it was surely idiotic to move the Tourist Information Centre from its central position at the junction of Pier Avenue and West Avenue, to the Town Hall.

Could this now be changing?  Pierre Oxley of the Clacton Chamber of Trade says, ‘If we do lose Peacocks and Bon Marché it would hit us hard. I always think that one empty shop leads to more appearing.  It looks like it is going to get harder and harder for businesses this year’.

Other depressing local news is that the number of unemployed within the Tendring District has risen steadily for five consecutive months.  There are 170 more people unemployed today than at the same time last year.  Nationally eight percent of 18 to 24 year olds are unemployed.  In the Tendring Area the figure is almost 12 percent, well above the national average. On the plus side, there have been more vacancies at Tendring’s Job Centres – the number has risen from 500 last November to 635 today.  Cheering perhaps, but it still means that there are about six applicants for every job vacancy!

A day or two ago I listened to a young man who has never experienced employment being interviewed on BBC Radio 4.  He has qualifications in gardening and regularly goes up to the local golf course where there is a half-promise of work some time in the future.  He is, of course, the kind of young man whom local authority parks and gardens departments were once seeking.  He would have started off on menial jobs like weeding flower beds and clearing them of rubbish, and gradually learnt his trade.  Who knows? He could have been another Alan Titchmarsh in the making!

However local authorities no longer have their own Parks and Gardens Staff.  They have to employ private contractors for the work that those departments once undertook.  In any case, the kind of jobs that this young unemployed man is capable of doing in the first instance are precisely those that supporters of David Cameron’s Big Society are hoping will be done free by enthusiastic volunteers!

How much longer will it be, I wonder, before that young man is not just unemployed but unemployable?

Waste and Recycling Collections

          I don’t think that I am likely to be accused of being an uncritical admirer of the current Tendring District Council and its policies. I had thought though that its members had reason to be proud of their waste and recycling collection service.  Householders are all issued with a supply of black plastic sacks for unrecyclable waste and a green box for items that can be recycled. These, in our district, are paper and cardboard, metal cans of every kind, and plastic bottles.

            Collections of both refuse and recyclables take place regularly, both on the same day each week.  Our council has stayed with a weekly collection while many others changed to fortnightly to save money.   I have been sorry that glass jars and bottles are not included among the recyclables.  It isn’t easy for those without a car to take glass containers to the nearest bottle bank and, for those who do have a car, burning petrol by making a special car journey for that purpose is surely defeating its purpose.

            Despite this reservation I was very surprised and disappointed to learn a month or two ago, that the Tendring District’s record for collecting recyclables was the poorest in the whole of Essex!  It is presumably in an effort to remedy this situation that the Council and their contractors Veolia intend to introduce a restructured collection system within the next few months.

            Every householder will be issued with a red recycling box for paper and cardboard only and two new green boxes, one large and one small, for cooked or raw food waste, in addition to the existing green box (which will then be used only for metal cans and plastic bottles) and the black plastic sacks used for residual waste.  The small new green box for food waste is to be kept in the kitchen and is intended to be emptied into the larger one to be kept out outside. 

The black plastic bag of unrecyclable waste will be collected and the large food waste container will be emptied ever week.  The red box of paper and cardboard and the green one of cans and plastic bottles will be collected on the same day but on alternate weeks.

            I realise that, now that I do no gardening and am living alone, I have virtually no food waste!   I use mostly frozen or otherwise ready-for-cooking vegetables and prefer vegetarian dishes though I am only a somewhat half-hearted vegetarian.  I never prepare and cook more food than I can eat in one meal!  Mind you, even in my previous married life when I was a keen gardener I would have had no food or other organic waste for the Council’s bins – I had my own garden to keep productive and my own compost bins to feed for that purpose!

            The Council’s new scheme seems a bit complicated but I hope that we’ll get used to it and that it will be a success.  As I ride round Clacton on my ‘iron horse’ I notice that on ‘collection days’ there are a substantial number of homes with several black plastic bags bursting with rubbish on display and not a green recyclables box in sight.  If Tendring is to move up the recycling ‘League Table’, dealing with these non-co-operating householders must be a top priority!

Just how ‘free’ is our ‘free’ Press?

If here is one thing about which all the witnesses at the Leveson enquiry into the behaviour of the press agree, it is that no-one wants a government controlled press.  We have seen the results of that in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union.   Our press must remain free and uncontrolled by politicians.  Although the excesses of which a ‘free press’ is capable have been made clear for all to see, there remains strong opposition to any kind of statutory control.

But just how ‘free’ are our newspapers?  Privately owned, they are subject to market forces like everything else in a market economy.  For their survival they depend heavily on their revenue from advertising.   The wise editor makes certain that he (or she) doesn’t upset too many advertisers too often.

This operates at even the very lowest level.  As many blog readers know, this blog is a direct descendant of the Tendring Topics comment column that I wrote every week in the Coastal Express (it actually changed its name several times but that is how I always thought of it!) for twenty-three years.   The Coastal Express relied heavily on advertising revenue from Estate Agents and from the sellers of new and used cars.  Nobody warned me, but my reason told me that it would be foolish to be too critical of either estate agents or used car salesmen!  So I wasn’t.  Searching back through my memory I don’t recall a single occasion on which this thought affected anything that I wrote – but it could have done.

Similarly, one of the witnesses at the Leveson Enquiry commented that if a reporter saw that his employer was enjoying cosy tea parties with the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers, and that a former senior colleague had been appointed as the Prime Minister’s personal spin doctor, his reports were likely to be slanted accordingly.

Rupert Murdoch made no bones about the fact that he controlled the Sun for political purposes (‘It was us wot done it’, boasted the Sun after a Tory victory) but is proud of the fact that he gives the editor of The Times free rein.  Very creditable – but surely the editor of The Times is well aware of Mr Murdoch’s general political philosophy and is unlikely to promote a point of view strongly opposed to it.  He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if he doesn’t actually call it – well, the piper knows his general musical taste. As a modern proverb that I heard recently put it, ’If you must hide your light under a bushel, make sure everyone knows under which bushel it is hidden!’

By the promotion or rejection of news stories as much as by direct persuasion, the news media does sway public opinion and thereby influence the results of local and general elections.  The BBC and the ITV set admirable examples of objectivity.  Perhaps newspapers should be run by independent editorial boards on similar lines.

I would not like to see government controlled newspapers, but the government does at least comprise politicians whom we can influence and ultimately accept or reject.   On balance I would prefer to read a newspaper run by people who are answerable to the electorate than by immensely wealthy individuals, answerable to no-one, who may not be British citizens and therefore owe no loyalty to our country; or Brits who have their fortunes stashed away in an overseas tax haven and who therefore escape our burden of taxation.  It is one thing for the very wealthy, whether they be Russian oil oligarchs or British or Trans-Atlantic multimillionaires, to own football teams, luxury yachts and half a dozen palatial homes – but quite another for them to control the means of influencing our thoughts and our choices.  They will inevitably serve their own best interests, which are very unlikely to be the same as ours!

An Early Learning Aid

            A modern silent movie’s nomination for this year’s film awards  took me back to my childhood when all films were silent!   Poole’s Cinema in Ipswich’s Tower Street, favoured by my parents because I was a member of a national daily’s ‘birthday club’ that gave me free admission, ‘when accompanied by a paying adult’, continued to project silent films long after all other local cinemas had gone over to ‘talkies’.   I well remember my first talkie – it was a ‘who-done-it’ called ‘The Argyle Case’ and I saw it at the Ipswich Regent Cinema (it’s still there I believe) in the late 1920s or early '30s.

            It has been only fairly recently when failing hearing has made me glad to make use of the subtitles nowadays available on tv programmes, that I have realized what a valuable learning aid those silent films must have been.  To really enjoy them you had to be able to read – and to read fast – before each caption disappeared and its successor appeared on the screen.

            Kids who might have scorned to read a ‘boring old book’ were desperately eager to know what ‘Buck Jones’ or ‘Tom Mix’ had said to the crooked Sheriff before leaping onto his trusty steed and galloping off to save the heroine from ‘a fate worse than death’*.   There was just one way to find out – learn to read!

            That accounts for the fact that, while I understand there are plenty of illiterates and semi-literates around today, during the seven years I spent in the Army from 1939 till 1946, I met only one chap who couldn’t read battery orders and couldn’t communicate with his mum and dad, and his girlfriend.  We had all spent our early childhoods speed-reading the subtitles of those silent movies!

*Yes, some of us were quite eager to find out what that was too!

         

            

Week 23 2011 14.6.2011

Tendring Topics……..on line


Phrase, Fable…..and Faith

A couple of years ago I changed my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for a later model. The representative from the mobility firm, a very bright and knowledgeable your man, explained to me how the controls worked. There’s a hand throttle that can be set at the beginning of a journey that determines maximum speed obtainable ‘When the arrow on the control knob is as far to the left as you can get it’, he said, ‘You’ve got the lowest speed. There’s a tortoise on the dial at that point to remind you’. He went on, ‘When the arrow is as far as it will go to the right, you’re on maximum speed – and you’ll see that there is a rabbit on the dial there to remind you’.

A rabbit? surely not. It must be a hare. And so of course it was. It was then that it dawned on me that this by no -means-ignorant young man had never heard of the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise – something that I imagined everyone knew from infancy. I certainly was never taught it at school. I must have just picked it up somewhere along the way – but where? Then I realized. We didn’t learn Aesop’s fables at school, nor did we learn the Greek myths. But by the time we left school we were pretty familiar with both – and with a huge swathe of stories from the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.

We had never learned those fables and those myths, but we had learned to read, and had continually practised reading out loud. In our infant years we had read Aesop’s fables and traditional ‘nursery’ stories such as the Babes in the Wood, Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the three Bears and so on. As we grew older we graduated to the Greek myths and the plots of some of Shakespeare’s plays.. I can even remember the books from which we read them. They were Nathaniel Hawthorn’s ‘Tanglewood Tales’ and Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Thus I learned all about Pandora and her box, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, The Trojan Horse, and the voyage home from Troy of Odyseus (I also remember learning that his wife’s name wasn’t pronounced Penny-lope as I had fondly imagined!). When, a few years later we started ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s plays, the plots of at least some of them were familiar to us. As we read aloud to the class we also learned how to speak ‘proper’ English – though we may still have preferred our own Suffolk dialect at home and in the playground!

As for the Bible, in those days it was felt that one religion and one moral code were as much as any child could be expected to cope with. We didn’t have RE. We had Scripture lessons and we studied both the Old and the New Testaments. We also, of course, had a School Assembly every day at which a passage from the Scriptures was read and a hymn, usually with a Biblical theme, was sung. Roman Catholic children, whose parents objected to our non-denominational lessons and assemblies, were excused them – but they had their own religious instruction elsewhere. I never met anyone who wasn’t at least nominally a Christian until years later when I was in the Army. Nobody left school without at least some acquaintance with the main themes of the Old and New Testaments

Nowadays all of that sounds antediluvian! I am sure that today, instead of ancient fables, myths and folk tales, they read (if they read aloud at all) something more ‘relevant’ to today’s world. Britain is a determinedly secular society, but one in which all children are taught something of the beliefs and practices of the world’s major religious faiths. The hope is, I suppose, that children will leave school with a feeling that there is a measure of truth in all religions. I think it much more likely that most will depart the education system convinced that all are equally delusional.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984 could fulfil their task of creating wealth for others without any acquaintance whatsoever with, for instance, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’, ‘the Boy who cried Wolf’, ‘the Trojan Horse’, ‘the Labours of Hercules’, ‘the Judas kiss’, ‘the Labourers in the Vineyard’, ‘the Widow’s mite’, ‘the Prodigal Son’, ‘Feeding the Five Thousand’, ‘Casting pearls before swine’.

Twenty-first century ‘proles’ (they’re nowadays more likely to be regarded as Human Resource Units) can do the same. Cultural ignorance won’t stop the wheels of industry from turning, or bankers collecting their bonuses. Politicians will still complain, and tabloid headlines mock, when ‘turbulent priests’ denounce policies which leave coming generations with no interests beyond computer games, professional football and the hope of ‘coming up on the lottery’.

Britain may, for all I know, become the most materially prosperous nation on earth but we will (if I may use an almost-forgotten metaphor) like Esau, have ‘exchanged our cultural birthright for a mess of pottage’!

A sub-culture of illiteracy?


Perhaps we ought not to worry too much about what children read and be thankful for the fact that, in our area at least, most children can read.

A week or so ago the London Evening Standard ran a series of news stories about the appalling standard of literacy among young people in London, and the effect that this has on their employment prospects. The newspaper claimed that 30 percent of children grew up in homes with no books. I find little consolation in the fact that 85 percent had access to a computer games machine!

Old people like me tend to go on and on about how different – and how much better – things were in the days when we were young. I try hard not to do that because I know perfectly well that I certainly wouldn’t want to be living again in mid-twentieth century England. In many ways life is infinitely better today than it was then.

I think though that school leavers were more literate in the 1930s than they appear to be today. Most children left school at 14 able to read and write. Their grammar and spelling may have left a lot to be desired, but they weren’t illiterate. Most of us, for example, read one or more boys’ magazines every week. They weren’t just ‘comics’. Full of exciting adventure stories, they were illustrated with line drawings but were by no means simply cartoons with captions. We read them from cover to cover and swapped them with our mates. There was the ‘Hotspur’, the ‘Rover’, the ‘Magnet’, ‘the Skipper’, the ‘Bullseye’ (this specialised in horror stories and incurred parental disapproval!) and others. They catered for boys between about the ages of 10 and 16. There were others for younger children and yet more for girls. Don’t forget that there was no tv in those days, only crackly ‘wireless sets’. Reading ‘tuppenny bloods’ as we called them (because they were full of blood and thunder?) was a major home leisure activity – a means by which we could escape into a world of Cowboys and Indians, of pirates and smugglers, of cannibals on tropical islands, ‘lost tribes’ in central Africa and - a theme that always fascinated us working class kids - posh English public schools!

I was in the army from 1939 till 1946, always in the barrack room (never the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess). I lived with farm labourers, shop assistants, factory hands, fishermen – most of them manual workers. I knew only one man who was unable to read the typed ‘Battery Orders’ displayed daily and who was unable to write home to his family, his wife or his girlfriend. He was neither unintelligent nor lazy and I have little doubt that today he would be diagnosed as dyslexic and given special support. This was, you’ll realize, during World War II when illiteracy would not have been a barrier to recruitment!

In prisoner of war camps it was writing and receiving letters to and from home that gave us hope and kept us sane. Some received ‘Dear John’ letters announcing that a girlfriend (occasionally a wife) had found her ‘true love’ and was saying goodbye. I was not one of those!

Nowadays I can no longer write with any confidence with a pen in my hand, but I can, thank God, still use a keyboard. Emails have made it possible for me to keep in touch with my scattered family and friends in a way that posted letters could never hope to do. Nor can I nowadays find the concentration needed to settle down with a book. This, I think, is partly failing eyesight and partly inability to remember what had happened on the previous page!

The Evening Standard is much better able than I am to discuss the effect that illiteracy has on job prospects. I do know though, from the experience of many years, how much pleasure the illiterate miss as a result their inability to enter the world of books – even if they never progressed beyond ‘who dunnits’ and ‘sex ‘n violence’ thrillers.

Finding employment for the disabled – and losing it for others!


The Government has begun its big initiative to help back into the job market disabled folk who are considered to be capable of work.. Firms who take them on as employees will have financial help when and for as long as they do so. I hope that the scheme will prove to be successful

I would have been more impressed if, at the same time, that same government’s policies were not ‘exporting overseas’ jobs that could, and should, have been performed by able-bodied workers here in Britain. Just last week came the news story that to meet the demands of the cuts to local authorities finances, Birmingham City Council is saving money by outsourcing IT work to India. This work can be done more cheaply in India because of the lower wages, and cheaper (and nastier!) housing, transport and other services that exist there.

Loss of jobs in this way is inevitable for as long as there is unrestricted movement world-wide of goods and capital, and values that rate the reduction of prices for the consumer and the maximising of profits for multi-national retailing empires, above the retention of jobs in the United Kingdom.

Cut into our public services even more deeply, increase the number of unemployed and reduce their benefit payments (there’s nothing like the incentive of starvation to encourage the unemployed to seek work!), widen still further the gap between the richest and poorest of our nation – and who knows, perhaps we too could become a source of cheap labour for wealthier nations! Is that a thought that cheers you up?

Lieben und geliebt zu werden ist das höchste Glück auf Erden


‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune on earth’

Regular readers of this blog will know that I quoted the above words, culled from a German calendar in 1944, at the partnership ceremony (same-sex wedding) of my granddaughter Jo and her partner Siobhan on 23rd April this year. I said that, in 60 years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had discovered their truth. I hoped that Jo and Siobhan would do the same.

How delighted I was three weeks later when, on my 90th birthday, Jo presented me with photos of her Grandma and I, and of herself and Siobhan, Siobhan holding their partnership certificate! The photos were displayed within a frame bearing the quotation from the German poet and philosopher Goethe! It was a deeply appreciated birthday present - and one that proved that my words on 23rd April had fallen on receptive ears!

Jo and Siobhan (Jo is on the right) on their ‘wedding day’, and Heather and I taken, I think in the 1990s, when we had been married for about 50 years.