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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