Week 18/08

                            Tendring Topics – on line

 

A Post Office saved – we hope!

 

            Two thousand five hundred branch post offices throughout Britain were closed in February of this year, nine of them within the Colchester and Tendring Districts.  Among these was the West Clacton Branch Post Office in Clacton's Freeland Road.   It is now hoped that this Office may be reopened within the next few weeks thanks to the Essex County Council.  It is one of twenty axed Essex branch post offices that the County Council intends to acquire and keep operational.

 

            The decision to close West Clacton Post Office seems to have been a particularly crass one.  It was situated inside a busy general store near Clacton Hospital and within easy walk of a popular part of the sea front.  Serving a community of some 20,000 people, it was well-used and profitable. Nevertheless, in a recent speech in the House of Lords, County Council Leader, Lord Hanningfield told their lordships that it had been closed, 'because there was a bus stop there and it had been said that people could get on a bus'.

 

            That seems to me to be an excellent reason for keeping it open.  Since it is on a bus rout and there is a bus stop there (it's the stop used by visitors to Clacton Hospital!) it means that less-than-agile people living at a distance can easily get there to collect their pensions, post their parcels and buy their stamps as well as, perhaps, do a little shopping.

 

            Lord Hanningfield says that his negotiations with the Post Office have reached a stage at which he hopes that it may be possible for this branch and one at Little Hallingbury, to reopen very shortly, perhaps some time this month.

 

            Gary Teer, Branch Postmaster, is of course delighted.  He had been contacted by the Essex County Council in February and had kept the store going and the Post Office counter in place – just in case!

 

            I have, in the past, been critical of Lord Hanningfield and the Essex County Council in this column.  I think it very likely that I shall be again in the future.

 

            However I think that on this occasion his Lordship and his county council colleagues deserve our thanks and congratulations.  They are definitely 'on the side of the angels'!

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                                   Rabies Alert

           

The recent biting of two workers in quarantine kennels, by a rabies infected dog brought into this country from Sri Lanka, has given us all a salutary warning that rabies remains a constant threat both to ourselves and to Britain's wildlife – which would need to be ruthlessly culled if  rabies ever secured a foothold in this country.

 

            While I was a Public Health Inspector employed by Clacton Council and particularly during the time that I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer, I was engaged, almost continuously, in what I suppose would nowadays be described as a 'Rabies Awareness Campaign'.

 

            Rabies is a particularly unpleasant disease.  It is contracted by the direct injection (usually by means of a bite) of an infected animal's saliva.  Dogs are the animals by far the most likely to contract and pass on the disease after being bitten by another infected dog or fox. I understand though that any mammal can contract the disease and thus become highly dangerous.  Once a victim has been bitten the progress of the disease can be halted in its tracks by the early injection of anti-rabies serum, developed in the first instance by Louis Pasteur, the 19^th Century French bacteriologist who, among much else, gave us 'pasteurisation' of milk!

 

This is usually one hundred percent effective.  However, if this injection is not carried out, or is long delayed after the bite, the extremely distressing symptoms of rabies – foaming at the mouth, terror of water (hydrophobia), muscular spasms and so on – will develop.  Once these symptoms have begun to develop the chances of the victim escaping an agonising death are virtually non-existent.

 

There has not been a death from rabies contracted in this country for over a century.  The main reason for this has been our rigid quarantine laws.  Until recently all animals brought into this country from overseas had to go into special quarantine kennels for a period of six months, before their owners were allowed to take them home.

 

The almost-an-island Tendring peninsula was, I used to tell the public, in the front line of Britain's defences against rabies.  As well as the major passenger port of Harwich, there were smaller ports, creeks and potential landing places where small yachts from the Continent might well put in overnight.  It was up to us to be vigilant.  An animal coming ashore from such a vessel would be potentially as dangerous as a bomb-carrying terrorist. Any such incident should be reported to the authorities.

 

Nowadays the regulations have been slightly modified.  There are now 'animal passports', certificates of health signed by a vet, and embodied 'chips' by which the 'passport holder' can be identified.  It is possible for a dog-owner to take his pet across the Channel - and back again – without facing a long period of quarantine.

 

 One of my sons and his family recently took me by ferry to France for the day, together with their now somewhat elderly boxer bitch.  I was impressed, and was pleased to be impressed, by the meticulous care that was taken by the passport control in Calais to check the dog's passport and identity – despite it being late at night and in the pouring rain! – before letting us on to the Dover-bound ferry.

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All Right for Some!

 

Worried about the state of the nation – or about how you're going to keep your, and your family's, finances 'in the black'?

 

You may well be.  Prices of food, fuel, power and transport are all going up (I'm glad I no longer have to buy petrol).  The amount that we pay the government in VAT and excise duty automatically goes up with them.  Council tax has gone up too and – especially if you have the misfortune to work in the 'public sector' – the chances are that you will have had a below-inflation pay increase.  This, in effect, amounts to a cut in pay. 

 

What's more, the price of houses is beginning to fall.  This is good news indeed for first time buyers but not for those who already have a mortgage, possibly with recently increased repayments, that is straining their resources.  Fail to keep up those payments and all hopes of the pride, security and independence that home ownership can bring (as promised by successive politicians!) come crashing to the ground.

 

Last year 27,000 home-buyers (they shouldn't really be described as 'home owners' until they have paid off that mortgage) were dispossessed and made homeless, usually because of failure to maintain their mortgage repayments.  That is about 250 a week or – as I assume that bailiffs don't work on Saturdays and Sundays – about 50 a day!   Next year, because of rising prices and mortgage repayments, well over 30,000 families are expected to lose their homes in this way.  

 

    Cheer up though – it's not all doom and gloom.  As though eager to confirm my conviction that our whole economic system is geared to making the rich ever richer and the poor even poorer, the super-rich in 'England's green and pleasant land' are doing very nicely. Our one thousand multi-millionaires added nearly £53 billion to their collective wealth last year!   They now own between them a total of £412.8 billion. They include 75 billionaires, 40 of whom have settled in this country from overseas.   Well, at least they're unlikely to be accused of being 'economic migrants' attracted by our social security benefits!

 

Twenty of those super-rich live in our own East Anglian Region – though you're not all that likely to rub shoulders with them in a check-out queue! They're not for instance quite in the extra-super-rich league as Roman Abramovich, the Russian tycoon whose fortune increased from £10.8 billion to £11.7 billion during the year.  (Chelsea Football Club certainly has a lot for which to thank the late Boris Yeltzin!)

 

However, our own multi-millionaires are certainly, as we used to say, 'not short of the odd bob!'

 

Leading the pack is Ms Kirsten Rausing whose fortune rose last year by £675 million to £3,500 million.  She owns stud farms in Suffolk and is on the board of Tetra Laval – developers of the Tetra Pak (later Petra Laval) operation, which revolutionised the packaging of milk and other beverages, and created a few millionaires on the way.  And to think that – it must have been in the 1980s – I once wrote an advertising feature about the revolutionary new milk carton called the Tetrapak in which Lord Rayleigh's Dairies were selling their milk!  A lot of milk, juices and other liquid food products have flowed through the processing plants since then!

 

Near the bottom of the East Anglian rich list, and (I think) nearest to Tendring District  geographically, are Bobbie Cowling, owner of Colchester United Football Club, and his wife Cheryl, who together come 19^th in East Anglia and 759^th nationwide, as owning a mere £105 million!

 

Commenting on East Anglia's wealthy residents, the East Anglian Daily Times mentions with approval that they are giving increasing amounts to charities.  Good for them; but surely, there's not much to be done with that amount of money except either to sit back and watch the pile grow – or to give it away!   I am inclined to think that there is more applause in Heaven when a lonely widow, living on her basic old age pension and whatever benefits she can muster, puts a few pence in a collecting box for those whom she sees as being worse off than herself, than when  multi-millionaires divest themselves of a spare million or so in a good cause.

 

A couple of lines from Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village come to my mind:

                     Ill fares the land, to hastening woes the prey

Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

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