Week 22.08

                             Tendring Topics – on Line

 

Prophetic Topics?

 

            The way in which issues that I touch on, sometimes quite lightly, in this on-line column tend to become matters of national concern overnight, is really quite disconcerting.  For the last two weeks I have expressed concern about the binge-drinking British culture and the violence and socially destructive behaviour of some of our young people.  Now all the newspapers and health pundits are becoming positively hysterical about both issues; and two particularly unpleasant acts of violence by youth on youth were reported in the news media during the past few days.

 

            But that's not all.  Way back in February I suggested that the indications were that there would be a big increase in the number of people rendered homeless during the current year.  A few days ago, under the headline 'Queue for homes set to get longer', the Coast Gazette' reported that within two years there could be as many as five million of us Britons on waiting lists for social housing.   'Almost half of councils say that they already cannot cope with the increasing demand for housing association accommodation, as the number waiting for it has grown from one million in 2001 to over one and a half million last year.  Hundreds of thousands more are expected to join them by 2010 as a result of high house prices, fewer mortgages and a slowdown in house building'.

 

            Everybody seems to agree with my prognosis, but I see little chance of my suggested remedy being put into effect; repealing council tenants' 'right to buy' legislation and encouraging local authorities to build homes for letting, as they had done for a century before the 'avaricious '80s'.   During those hundred years, Britain's worst slums were demolished and overcrowding in Britain's homes drastically reduced and kept under control.

 

Nor do I see much chance of the government switching the burden of taxation from indirect taxation (VAT, duties on fuel, tobacco, alcohol and so on) to direct taxation (income tax and death duties).  Now the cost of motoring, an immediate result of indirect taxation, is rocketing and nation-wide protests are threatened.  The increase in the cost of motoring might be justified if the revenue were used to bring down the cost of rail fares, but not a bit of it.  Rail fares are rocketing at the same time!

 

            Last week I had my hot water/central heating boiler serviced and a faulty ball-valve replaced.  The total cost was £115.  I paid that cheerfully, but I did resent the extra £20.13 that I then had to pay to the government as VAT for the privilege of having essential maintenance carried out on my home!

 

            I don't enjoy paying income tax but, unlike VAT and other indirect taxes, it is based on my ability to pay.  I am very fortunate in having an income high enough to be liable for tax.  Thousands are not so lucky.  What's more, my tax is deducted directly from my pension.  I never see it, so I never miss it.  Neither of these factors is true of VAT and Customs duties.

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                                 Regenerating Tendring

 

I was quite pleased to see that at least some of Tendring's Councillors, and the local press, share my scepticism about the value of the private company that the Council has created (with our money!) to further the Tendring District's 'regeneration'.  As one of the councillors pertinently asked;  'Why can't the council's own regeneration department do it?'

 

            One reason that has been offered is that much of the hoped-for finance for regeneration will come from grants from Quangos. These, so it is claimed, are only available to private companies.   I can see why a private company would be able to attract investment (i.e. borrow money) from sources that would be barred to a local authority.  Limited companies can take risks with other people's money that councils can't. The Company may of course, make a profit from that investment. If they do everybody will be happy. If they fail, the directors can walk away from the debt with the minimum of inconvenience to themselves – though, of course, failure can spell ruin to those who are owed money.

 

            But why on earth should Quangos (quasi-autonomous-non-governmental organisations), or anyone else, prefer to give money to a private company rather than to a democratically elected local authority?

 

            So far it seems, the whole of the new company's capital (provided by the council!) is being invested in staff.  'But of course', will say the private enterprise enthusiasts, 'they won't be fuddy-duddy council bureaucrats but thrusting, go-ahead entrepreneurs'.

 

            Perhaps.  I am reminded though of a comment made by a cynical colleague of mine when, many years ago now, Tendring Council was proposing to employ a new official to undertake much the same duties as those of the Regeneration Company today:  'They'd be wise to hold interviews for the job at the municipal swimming pool', said my colleague, 'If the candidates can't walk on water they'll be unlikely to be able to meet the Council's expectations!'

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No room (without a drugs test) at the Inn?

 

            I was fascinated to read in the Clacton Gazette that the landlords of three well-known Clacton pubs had agreed to co-operate with the Police in a trial scheme involving testing their customers for drug use.  Somehow I couldn't imagine any of the pub landlords that we meet in 'The Bill' or 'Holby Blue' being quite so obliging!

 

            Police officers set up screening equipment at the entrances of the Moon and Starfish, Crab and Pumpkin and Tom Pepper s. They then, as a condition of entrance, asked incoming customers to submit to having swabs taken from their hands, from which the screening equipment could detect recent contact with such drugs as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamine or cannabis.

 

            Police-Sergeant Richard Wardleworth was reported as saying that some traces of drugs were picked up but, when searched, no drugs were found on the people concerned, so no action was taken.   He added, 'We didn't make any arrests but there were some groups of people who saw what we were doing and refused to go into the pub; that was very telling.'

 

            'Telling' indeed – but what did it tell?   I'm not familiar with Tom Peppers but I have been in the Moon and Starfish recently for lunch on a couple of occasions and, in the past, particularly when I was freelancing for Essex County Newspapers, I would occasionally pop into the Crab and Pumpkin (almost opposite the 'Gazette' office) for a lunch-time drink and a chat with a friend or colleague.

 

            I have never in my life taken illegal drugs (as a matter of fact I have never in my life even been offered any!) and I have no reason whatsoever for wishing to avoid the Police.  Nevertheless if, with a friend, I were heading for a local hostelry for refreshment and saw a posse of police at the door stopping and interviewing everyone who entered, I think that I too would prefer to head elsewhere. What, I wonder, would that tell Sergeant Wardleworth about me?

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 What about the Weather?

 

            In Britain, whatever else may fail the weather can always be depended upon to give us something to talk about!

 

            What a year it has been. The abnormal is becoming the norm!   It was certainly the most miserable Easter that I can ever remember – and I can remember quite a few chilly and damp ones in the past.   The May Day Bank Holiday, celebrated five days after Mayday this year, was warm and sunny, absolutely perfect, as was the week following.   I had the good fortune to have a celebratory birthday break in Brussels the following weekend.  We enjoyed a few days of soaring temperatures, cloudless skies and light southerly breezes.  In Brussels and in Luxemburg my son and daughter-in-law, my grandson and I enjoyed all our meals each day in outdoor cafés.

 

The rot set in almost as soon as I set foot again on English soil.  There was a chilly wind  when we landed at Dover and it was chillier still the next day when I got back to Clacton.  The weather steadily deteriorated, reaching a climax on the Spring Bank Holiday Monday with howling gales and steady, drenching rain.  The following Thursday the Clacton Gazette's front page headline was A TOTAL WASHOUT ….beaches left deserted as storm blows.  No-one could have put it better.

 

It is interesting to reflect that if, instead of celebrating the secular Late Spring Public Holiday on the last Monday in May, we had continued to stick to the old Whitsun or Pentecost moveable feast of the Christian Church, we would have enjoyed it a fortnight earlier in the  glorious sunshine that we experienced in Belgium, where they still kept the old Whitsun date.

 

No, those who like myself, are dismayed by the tide of secularism that threatens to engulf us, cannot use the weather in our defence of the traditional.  As I have already noted, during the great Christian feast of Easter the weather was awful – and it hadn't been that much better at Christmas either!

 

What will the summer bring?  I think that the wise will keep both their sun-cream and their winter woollies handy.  They may well need both.

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                                      The Scourge of the BBC

 

            Did you watch the drama/documentary about Mrs Mary Whitehouse on BBC2 at 9.0 p.m. on the evening of the 28^th May?   I think that the former scourge of the BBC would have been very pleased, and probably very surprised, at the even-handed and sympathetic treatment she received from those whom she had so fiercely criticised.  She certainly appeared in a more favourable light than the BBC's Director General whom she regarded, not without reason it seems, as her arch-enemy.

 

I was never a great admirer of Mrs Whitehouse.  It seemed to me that she was a little too ready to criticise the BBC and not half critical enough of ITV.

 

It must be said though that her direst prophecies have been fulfilled.  We are an increasingly violent society. Despite comprehensive sex education at schools (or just possibly because of it!) we have more and more teenage pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases are on the increase.  Walk behind any group of children, of any age above about eight and of either or mixed sex, and you may well hear language that would have raised eyebrows in a well-run barrack room sixty years ago.

 

Radio and tv (not just  BBC radio and tv) must bear some of the responsibility for this but they are not alone.  At the root of the problem is the fact that we have, with the laudable intention of fitting in to a multi-faith society and showing respect for other cultures and traditions, ceased to promote the 'Christian values' that Mrs Whitehouse struggled so hard to preserve; and haven't found anything worthwhile with which to replace them.

 

Do we really believe, as we seem to, in a kind of fundamentalist Darwinism which takes it for granted that life has no purpose beyond the propagation of the species and the satisfying of the senses; that there is no ultimate power to whom we must all eventually answer; and that if one or more of our pleasurable activities has an undesirable reaction (an unwanted baby, an unpleasant disease, an economic or environmental effect) we must immediately seek a means of getting rid of that unfortunate side effect so that we don't even have to consider the possibility of foregoing that dangerous, but pleasurable, activity?

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Week21.08

                              Tendring Topics – on line

 

Blogspot into Web Site!

 

            There's no doubt about it. Members of my family have original ideas. It was  Grandson Nick, now living in Brussels who first created this blogspot on which I have posted Tendring Topics – on line every week since January.  Now, as an eighty-seventh birthday present, he has expanded that blogspot into a web site with the very simple address of www.ernesthall.net . 

 

  Tendring Topics – on line will continue to be available as before to those who prefer to access www.ernesthall.blogspot.com .  However, those who click onto the new website address will, as well as finding Tendring Topics on the first or home page, be able to access my gallery of photographs. There are over 200 of them – many of the family but others of general interest like the sea frozen over in Clacton, a glimpse into boys and girls primary school classrooms in the 1930s and now- unrepeatable pictures like the ancient Turkish bridge at Mostar in Croatia before it was destroyed in that bloody and, in my opinion, totally unjustified civil war.

 

            Other 'pages' that can be accessed with a click are About me, an introduction to me as I am now; My life which is autobiographical and possibly of interest both to my family and   to those with a historical interest in the twentieth century, particularly in World War II; and My sermons, the typescripts of sermons that I have preached at Christ Church URC Church in Clacton and elsewhere.  I included that final section with some hesitation but I shall refer to them from time to time to reinforce my own often-fragile faith (all those sermons were directed as much at myself as at the congregation!), and some of them may, just possibly, be of value to others.

 

            Apart from About me and My pictures, these 'pages' are still in their early stages.  They will be added to as I find time to unearth material from my computer files and elsewhere.

 

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Twenty-first Century Britain

 

            Soon after I had posted last week's Tendring Topics – on line I began to have misgivings about it.  Had I been unfair in unfavourably contrasting the behaviour of Britain's adults and young people with those on the European mainland?  I knew perfectly well that, for all England's imperfections, it was the homeland for which I had yearned during those three long years that I had been a prisoner of war, and where I was happy to live today.

 

            Much as I had felt 'at home' on the mainland, both last year and this, I had not the slightest desire to live permanently anywhere in Europe other than in the UK or, in fact, anywhere in the UK other than in Southern East Anglia!  Nor have I ever had the least wish to visit, much less live in, sunny California, hospitable New England or the Antipodes!

 

            While I was thinking about this and wondering if there was something that I should do to redress the balance, I received an email from my elder grandson Chris. Aged 26, he is just completing his second year as a teacher in Taiwan. It was very nice to learn that Tendring Topics – on line has at least one reader on the other side of the world!   It seemed too that the very two paragraphs in my last week's blog that had been causing me some concern had, as we Quakers say, 'spoken to his condition'.  Here are a few brief extracts from his email:

           

            I couldn't agree more with you.  Every day I wake up here I feel so lucky to live in a peaceful place and not in London. I find English culture so lacking in respect for older people, or for anyone for that matter. It has really made me feel sick when, in London, I have seen teenage yobs on the top deck of a bus, smoking, playing music from their cell phones and threatening, or showing lack of respect to those around them.

 

            Even the worst children here wouldn't dream of behaving like London kids in public.  They would be instantly scolded by every adult on the bus. No-one would tolerate it.  I don't know if it is because there is a low divorce rate, or mothers staying at home for their children, or greater importance put on having a functional family unit, but there is a stark culture difference in Taiwan toward treatment of children, and I am in no doubt which is the best.  I know for a fact that no kids are left at home for most of the night with keys, a tv remote control and a games console!

 

            As soon as I have a problem with a kid's behaviour and I think he or she needs reeling in, I have the full support of my director and the parents, and my judgement isn't questioned for a minute.

 

            The children and parents show a lot of respect for teachers here. The parents ask me about their children, value everything that I say and co-operate fully in their education. All quite different from England, where it seems that everyone tries hard to undermine teachers and make the job a total nightmare!

 

            It should be stressed that Chris is referring to behaviour that he has seen and experienced in London.  I am sure that things aren't as bad as that in our own Tendring Peninsula – but they are quite bad enough!      

 

            This morning I have seen a scare headline in one of the tabloids warning us that thousands of us Brits are emigrating because of the 'virtually uncontrolled inflow of foreign immigrants'.   I think it much more likely that they are getting out because of the yobbish behaviour of some of our own native-born fellow-countrymen and women!

 

            I didn't see very many obviously 'foreign' faces in those disgraceful scenes on tv news bulletins after last week's football match in Manchester!

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Post Script

 

            A few hours after I had typed the above, I picked up the Coast Gazette from my front door mat.  Its front page headline was YOUNG FACES OF EVIL over a news story of the sexual assault and brutal killing in Colchester of a young mother from Clacton by two boys, one 16 and the other 13 years old.

 

            Another, much less serious but nevertheless disturbing, news story this week was of the St. Osyth Parish Council meeting that had to be abandoned because of the behaviour of about twenty young people (mostly girls between 13 and 17 years old!) running amok round the village hall, shouting abuse and hurling stones.

 

            I know that I shouldn't condemn a whole generation because of just a handful of delinquent kids – but I have an uneasy feeling that for every one young person who gets into serious trouble with the police there are probably at least twenty whose behaviour is thoroughly antisocial but who manage either to evade the law or to stay precariously just within its limits.  

 

            Even multiplied by twenty, the number of offenders and potential offenders is probably a small minority of the young people in this country.  My word though; it is a minority capable of producing a great deal of fear, distress and misery among the rest of us!

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                                       Empire Day!

 

            I wonder how many people under the age of 75 even realize that this Saturday, 24^th May used to be celebrated as Empire Day.  Very few I fancy.  Yet in the 1920s and '30s it was one of the important non-holiday dates that punctuated our year.

 

            Others included Boat Race Day.  It was amazing how many people with no connection whatsoever with either University 'supported' one or other of the crews in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and wore light blue or dark blue 'favours', sold by street hawkers for a penny or tuppence each, to proclaim their loyalty. 

 

            Then there was Armistice Day on 11^th November when everyone wore a Flanders Poppy and observed a strict two-minutes silence at 11 a.m.  All ex-servicemen wore their campaign medals and there were still many youngish war widows and blind, limbless or otherwise disabled casualties from World War I in evidence.

 

            Armistice Day was a sad occasion and by the evening of Boat Race Day something like half the population would always be disappointed with the performance of 'their' crew.

 

            Empire Day though (the date had been chosen because it had been the birthday of the Queen-Empress Victoria) was an occasion that everyone could celebrate without reservation.  It wasn't a school holiday but it was certainly a school-day with a difference.  At the morning assembly we would always have suitable thanksgiving prayers and scripture readings, and an appropriate hymn, Kipling's Recessional for instance or 'I vow to thee, my country'.  In my primary school (and I don't think that we were unique in this!) we used to march round the playground and salute the flag – the Union Jack that fluttered bravely overhead.

 

            In my secondary school, attended only by a privileged minority, we didn't quite go to those lengths.  The flag was flown though and at some time during the day we would be treated to a talk, sometimes illustrated by epidiascope, by a visitor (always a white Anglo-Saxon, of course) from Zululand, Jamaica, Singapore, the Khyber Pass or some other exotic outpost of Empire.  Always too we were told of the differences between a Self Governing Dominion, a Crown Colony, a Protectorate or (since the end of World War I) a Mandated Territory and reminded of the opportunities that still existed for Empire builders among our far-flung possessions.  Just look at the red on the world map, we were told, it was 'the Empire on which the sun never set' – the greatest and most enlightened Empire that the world had ever known.

 

            In 1937 at the age of 16 I sat for and passed the London University School Leaving Examination (the matric).  One of my exam subjects was British and World History from 1815 to 1914, a period of tremendous Imperial expansion and consolidation.  I was awarded a 'distinction' mark in that particular paper.

 

            Had anybody told me then that by the time I was middle aged, the British Empire would have disappeared (and that most people would feel that that was a good thing!) I'd have been quite sure that they were insane.

 

            Who would have thought that one of the verses of arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling's Recessional would prove to be so prophetic?

 

Far-called, our navies melt away:

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget; lest we forget!

 

            Our pomp of Empire is indeed 'one with Nineveh and Tyre'.  I wonder what similar surprises may await my grandchildren and my great grandchildren (if I ever have any!) in the decades that lie ahead.

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Week 20.08

                             Tendring Topics – on Line

 

Europe without Frontiers

 

            Last weekend  (9^th to 12^th May) my elder son and daughter-in-law drove me to Brussels to celebrate my shortly forthcoming 87^th birthday.  My younger grandson had recently taken up an appointment there with the European Travel Commission and I was keen to see his new apartment and to hear how he was getting on.  He would show us round the town.

 

            I enjoyed every minute of my visit.  One thing that struck me very forcibly throughout the weekend was the number of reminders of the two World Wars, and of earlier conflicts, that there were in the corner of Europe through which we drove.

 

            We crossed the Channel by Norfolk Line Ferry from Dover to Dunkirk.  It is impossible to see that harbour mole, those beaches and the sand dunes behind them without thinking of the defeated British army that was heroically evacuated from there in the spring of 1940 – and lived to fight, and win, another day.  I was lucky.  My Regiment had had its embarkation leave and was all set to join the British Expeditionary Force when it became clear that on this occasion the panzers had triumphed.   We stayed in England.

 

            Brussels was twice occupied by the German army during the twentieth century.  We went on an excursion in an ancient tram-car dating from 1910, through the suburbs into untouched woodland.  The tram-car had survived both World Wars.  Who can say who might have used it?  Certainly, lots of ordinary squaddies (German and later French and British) on leave from the front. Possibly Edith Cavell, the Norfolk nursing sister who was executed by firing squad in 1915 for helping British POWs to escape from captivity, could have used it to get to the hospital in which she had been nursing the wounded of all the combatant countries.  

           

Signposts in Brussels pointed to Quatre Bras and Waterloo, sites of the final two battles of the Napoleonic Wars.   It was in Brussels that, on the night before the battle of Waterloo, the British High Command had invited the local belles and their escorts to meet the troops (only selected 'officers and gentlemen' of course!) at a grand ball – an event immortalised in Byron's poem 'Eve of Waterloo' .

 

             On the Sunday we drove from Brussels through to Luxemburg.  We visited the capital city and made an excursion into the thickly wooded and mountainous countryside, making a brief detour through a corner of Germany so that we wouldn't return by exactly the same route as that through which we had come.

 

            It was along tracks through the thickly wooded Ardennes mountains on the borders of Luxemburg and Belgium, that the German armoured columns had made their final desperate attack just before Christmas 1944, driving a wedge between the British and American forces and proudly proclaiming that they were on their way 'back to Paris!'

 

            Some of the most desperate and bloody fighting of the war's western front ensued.  For the only time on that front, so I believe, massacres of prisoners of war took place – first by Hitler's elite SS troops but later, in retaliation, by allied forces too.

 

            What particularly struck all four of us, my son and daughter-in-law, my grandson and myself, during that weekend was the fact that those national frontiers  over which so much blood had been spilt in two world wars and in earlier conflicts, had now disappeared!   Even the previous year when we had visited Germany, there had been some national boundaries and frontier check points.  Now there were none.

 

            The boundaries between English Counties are today more conspicuously marked than the once fiercely defended national frontiers between Europe's warring nations!  Even non-EU Norway has removed its frontier posts.  I am assured that throughout the whole of western and central Europe the only frontier check-points that exist are between Switzerland and its neighbours, and the UK and its neighbours and EU partners.

 

            We're still a long way from Lord Tennyson's 19th century vision of a future in which

 

The war-drums throb no more, and the battle-flags are furled

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

 

            However, a start towards that dream has been made in Europe – a Europe of which we British are a part and from which, in my opinion, we should not be hanging back!

 

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Brussels and Luxemburg

 

            Sorry, I have gone on a bit about those frontiers, but their virtual abolition does seem important to me – and it's what is important to me that I write about in this blog!

 

            What did I think of Brussels itself – and of Luxemburg?   Well, as to Brussels, I have to confess that my view may be coloured by the fact that I was the guest of my son and daughter-in-law in the Raddison Hotel, near the European Parliament and one of the best in Brussels.   For three nights I certainly discovered 'how the other half lives!'   My luxuriously carpeted room had a double bed, easy chair, writing desk with upholstered chair in front of it, a tv set offering every tv station I had ever heard of and many that I hadn't, a well-stocked fridge, a cupboard with an electric kettle and tea and coffee making facilities and several power points – plus a roomy en suite bathroom with sit-in bath and shower and a walk-in shower in a shower cabinet plus, of course, wash basin and wc. My bed was made for me and my room tidied up every day – what a treat for an old widower living alone! – and a telephone offered instant fulfilment of my slightest wish!

 

            Perhaps it's just as well that I was nearly 87!

 

            My grandson has a very nice flat with comfortable bedroom, roomy kitchen and sitting room into which he has introduced a small 'office area' with his computer, technical library and other necessities.   He is not, by the way, one of those 'overpaid Brussels bureaucrats' that you read about in the Sun and the Daily Mail. The European Travel Commission (you can look it up on the web) isn't part of the EU but exists to promote tourism throughout Europe (yes, I have put in a word for Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton and historic Harwich!) and is funded quite separately by European governments, including those, like Norway and Switzerland, that aren't yet members of the EU

 

            I had been to Brussels once before but only for a few hours so I certainly hadn't realized its full potential.  On this visit I was particularly taken by its splendid parks with their green open spaces, woodland and ornamental lakes.  All very lovingly and painstakingly cared for, by I imagine, fulltime staff who take a pride in their task; certainly not by contractors who have just one objective – to claim every penny they can, while doing as little as they can get away with!

 

            Not only is there spacious parkland within the city boundaries but outside, less than ten minutes drive away is thick virgin forest, evocative of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding-Hood and the sinister gingerbread house stumbled upon by Hansel and Gretel!

 

I hadn't realized quite how very many excellent 'pavement cafés' there were in Brussels, or what excellent meals they served.  We patronised them on a number of occasions.  I was surprised too, to see large numbers of people sitting outside these cafés, chatting, sipping their (very strong!) Belgian beer, and clearly enjoying themselves up to, and probably beyond, midnight.   In England I fear, a similar group would have been legless – and probably violent with it – long before that!   I am sure that Brussels has its drunks – but I didn't see one.

 

On the Sunday we were in Luxemburg.  We lunched (more than adequately!) at a pavement café in a tiny village in a deep valley in the mountains.  Also lunching there was a large, presumably Luxemburg, family.  There was a father, mother and a number of children of different sexes and ages.  All were clearly enjoying themselves and the children were conversing with their parents and behaving impeccably. 

 

            Perhaps the children had been disciplined and indoctrinated in a way that would have been unacceptable in Britain.  I don't know.  I do know that it was a pleasure to share the café with them – and that I would have been dismayed and apprehensive if a British family of similar size had walked in!

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Natural Disasters – and Man-made Tragedies

 

            Tens of thousands of our fellow human beings were killed and hundreds of thousands rendered homeless by the typhoon that struck Burma. Further tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands rendered homeless by an earthquake in China.

 

            No-one who has watched on tv news bulletins the agonised faces of mothers or fathers seeking their missing children, or men and women who have lost their spouses, will ever again comfort themselves with the thought that, 'Well, of course, they're used to that kind of thing.  They don't feel about it quite as we would'.  But they do feel the pain of loss exactly as we would.  Many of the survivors probably suffer agonies of guilt and doubt as well.

           

It might have been thought that with so much plainly visible misery – the result of natural disasters – in the world, mankind would think again about its capacity to inflict even more death, pain and misery on our fellow humans.

 

            Those of us who pray daily – even if only mechanically – 'Our Father, which art in Heaven……..', are proclaiming that all men and women are their brothers and sisters.   Those who believe, as I do, that the light of Christ shines in the heart of every man, woman and child in the world must know that whatsoever we do, or fail to do, to our fellow men and women we are doing to Christ.   'Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto the very least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me!'

 

            Yet do the horrors that we have seen unleashed in Burma and China make us have second thoughts about our own activities?  Not a bit of it. In Christ's own homeland Palestinians protest in the only way they know at those who have made their land a vast concentration camp.  The Israelis respond, in the only way they know, by indiscriminately killing ten Palestinians for every Israeli death.

 

            Killing goes on in Iraq, in Afghanistan.  Bomb outrages are experienced all round the world and it seems that, even in our own country, there are those who plot to destroy us.   Meanwhile 'the west' spends millions on nuclear defence including, of course, the further development of the very 'weapons of mass destruction' that we are so eager to make sure shouldn't fall into 'the wrong hands' – any hands but ours, in fact.

 

            I sometimes have the distinctly un-Quakerly and un-Christian thought that what we all need is a warning from nature - a widespread but non-lethal earthquake for instance – to 'give us a good shake' and bring us to our senses.  In an earlier age it would have been called a demonstration that 'God is not mocked!'

 

            Come to think of it – perhaps that is exactly what is happening with progressive and accelerating Global Warming.

 

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Week 19.08

                               Tendring Topics – on line

 

Those Elections!

 

            The local news media may well have given the impression that we in the Tendring District were the only people in the UK who had no opportunity to vote in last week's elections. There were, in fact, a great many others.  At the time of local government reorganisation way back in the 1970s local authorities were given the choice of holding elections for one third of their members every year or of dissolving the entire council and having a 'general election' every fourth year.   Our Council was one of those that chose the latter option.

 

            It is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if there had been an election here.  Would we have followed the national trend in dismissing our present 'anything but Conservative' coalition – or would we have followed the example of our nearest neighbour, Colchester, where voters dismissed a Conservative administration and rewarded the Lib.Dems. and – to a lesser extent – Labour?

 

            No doubt the Party faithful on both sides are sure of what the outcome would have been - but I am less certain.  The current Council is subject to a great deal of criticism in the correspondence column of the local press.  On the whole though, I don't think that they have done too badly, considering the very limited room for manoeuvre that central government allows them.

 

            I don't think that the private company that they have created to plan our district's regeneration will give us value for money – but I have come to love Clacton's new town centre with its wide pavements, its seats and its protected-from-vandals street trees.  The fact that my means of transport is a mobility scooter may colour my judgement but, as you may have noticed, there are quite a few of us scooter-riders in Clacton. There is no reason why our voice should remain unheard!

 

            One thing that has struck me about the competing political parties in recent years is how little real difference there is between them.  Under New-Labour the gap between rich and poor has become even wider, virtually every human activity that can be privatised has been, and we have blindly followed the lead of the most reactionary American administration within living memory, into a war that we were deceived into entering, that many people believe to have been illegal and that still exacts a toll of British, and of course Iraqi, lives.  Meanwhile, a new 'caring' Conservative Party is claimed to be evolving, apparently as different from the 'Squire and his relations' Party of my youth as today's New-Labour is from the 'Keep the Red Flag flying high' Labour activists of that distant time. Well, we shall see. Handsome is as handsome does!  

 

            This bipartisanship in objectives, if not in the detail of implementation, is probably fine, provided that everything locally and nationally is going smoothly.   Things may be very different when – as seems at least possible in the very near future – economic and social problems threaten to overwhelm us.

 

            At last week's local elections 65 percent of those eligible to vote didn't bother to do so.  London had 'a high turn-out' but there was still a majority – 55 percent – of abstentions.

 

            This, I very much fear, is a situation in which those abstainers, together with  increasing numbers of the disenchanted and disillusioned of the main parties, could find themselves under the spell of some emerging young politician, charismatic, intensely nationalistic and Euro-phobic, "determined to do away with the time-wasting and point-scoring arguments of the 'yesterday's men and women' of the existing political parties, and to lead the way to a new cleaner, fresher, politics-free, go-ahead Britain – a truly Great Britain - of which our forbears would have been proud".

 

            Just such a young and charismatic politician as, for example, the youthful Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler must have been!

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                 'Call me early, call me early, Mother dear…….'

 

            It is a long time since, in his poem 'The May Queen,' Lord Tennyson put those words into the mouth of the doomed village belle who wanted her mother to call her early because 'tomorrow' was:

 

Of all the glad New Year Mother, the maddest, merriest day –

For I'm to be Queen of the May Mother. I'm to be Queen of the May!

 

            The May Day Holiday has changed a lot since the days when an annually elected May Queen presided over a day of rustic frolicking on the village green.   It became 'Labour Day – one of working class protest against exploitation in the 'dark satanic mills' of the industrial revolution.  Now it is just another not-very-popular public holiday - a long weekend in which the rail service is disrupted by long overdue maintenance work, and cars clog the highways as their owners and their families make their way to holiday resorts, or to airports from which they can 'get away for a few days in the sun'.

 

            It's not a holiday for which I have ever been able to feel much enthusiasm.  For one thing, it is held on 1st May only when this happens to fall on a Monday.  Otherwise it is held on the Monday following 1^st May.  I'm sure that that wasn't the case in the days when village maidens danced round the Maypole and the local lads queued up to climb a greasy pole, to have their fortunes told by 'a genuine Romany', or to win a golden guinea by enduring five minutes 'in the ring' against a 'former army boxing champion of India!' You have only to refer to Flora Thompson's 'Lark Rise to Candleford' (the book, not the tv version) to know how important the actual May Day was to village children at the beginning of the twentieth century.

 

            Then again, the May Day holiday usually means that there are no less than three public holidays – Easter, May Day, and the late spring public holiday – within a few weeks of each other at a time when, at least on the East Anglian Coast, the weather is rarely at its most welcoming.   What's more, after that, there isn't another public holiday until the very end of August, with autumn already looming over the horizon!

 

            This year, it must be said, things have been different.  An exceptionally early Easter plus the fact that the May Day Holiday wasn't celebrated until the 5^th May meant that there was a much bigger gap than usual between Easter and 'May Day'.  The weather this Easter was the worst that I can ever remember – and I can remember quite a lot of wet and chilly Easters!   On the other hand the weather on the May Day holiday, and for several days before and after it, was absolutely marvellous – brilliant sunshine, warm breezes, Clacton was full of visitors and tills were ringing merrily along the sea front and in the town.

 

            These are not circumstances that are likely to be repeated.  Since the inception of the May Day public holiday I cannot recall another one with anything like such pleasant weather as this year's and I am sure that I heard some pundit on the tv say that it would be another eighty years before there would be another similarly early Easter.

 

             Demands for the replacement of the May Day holiday by another, more suitable day, may have been dampened by this year's unusual circumstances, but I doubt if they will have been extinguished.

 

Some have suggested that it should be replaced by an autumn holiday, but I think that it would be better to bring the late spring public holiday forward a fortnight into mid-May and then, instead of the May Day holiday, to have an 'early summer' holiday at the end of June – to celebrate the end of the school leaving and University exams perhaps!

 

This would reduce the plethora of early spring holidays and do something towards filling that yawning gap between the holiday at the end of May and the next one, three months later, at the end of August.

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                                      Guys and Dolls

 

            I can't say how much I dislike the ubiquitous use of guys to mean youngish members of the human race, both male and female.  Royal princes use it to refer to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  BBC commentators use it to refer to aspiring athletes.   To me guy will always conjure up the image of a shabby figure made of straw, clad in cast-offs, and destined for early incineration!

 

            I know.  There isn't in English-English any informal word to mean persons of both sexes.  May I break it to you that there used not to be in American-English either.

 

            If both guys and dolls can become guys why shouldn't  fellows (pronounced 'fellers') and birds become simply fellows or chaps.

 

            There is, you see, a choice in English-English!  

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