Tendring Topics……. on Line
Teenage Drinking
All of us these days except, I suppose, the young people immediately involved, are deeply concerned about teenage (and younger children) drinking. Targeting pubs, and particularly, off-licences and supermarkets, is obviously a good idea. I fancy though that, probably through the collaboration of just-a-little-older kids who can legally buy alcoholic drinks, really determined thirteen or fourteen olds, with money in their pockets, will always manage to get hold of whatever drink they want.
Why do some kids drink themselves silly whenever they get the opportunity?
I think that it is almost always peer pressure that makes them start both drinking and smoking. Adolescents (I was one once!) are often desperate to be accepted as 'one of us' and, having gained acceptance, to prove that they are as good as, if not better (which sometimes means more outrageous) than everyone else. Once started, for some people both tobacco and alcohol can be dangerously addictive.
I don't think that firm coercive measures will solve the problem. Nor am I deeply impressed with the government's latest idea of suggesting to parents that they might introduce alcohol to their children in small and manageable doses! It is all too similar to the even dafter idea that allowing pubs to stay open all day and all night would encourage moderate and responsible drinking!
I don't think either that providing more youth clubs, gymnasia, and other leisure facilities will help as much as some imagine. At the risk of being boring I have to say that in my youth we had nothing like the leisure and cultural facilities available to both young and old today. We too had our bullies, our yobs and our hooligans – but we ourselves didn't drink (none of us could afford to for one thing!) and we despised and made fun of any drunk adult who crossed our path.
I was impressed by a report on tv of a programme developed by the West Lothian Police Authority in Scotland.
There, they are tackling individual young drinkers. They stop groups of adolescents leaving school or college and check whether any have alcohol with them, and they pounce immediately on groups of young people drinking in public about whom complaints are received. Many, perhaps most, of these will scatter and get away. However the Police normally manage to net one or two. They don't 'arrest' them but they do detain them and take them back, in the police van, to the Police Station. They then send for their parents and both parent and child are interviewed
What happens next depends, of course, upon the skill of the interviewer. In the part of the interview that was shown on tv the interviewer was trying determinedly to appeal to the 'better nature' of the young person; to what early Quakers would have unhesitatingly referred to as the 'inward light of Christ' that lies deep in the heart of every man, woman and child in the world. 'Do you see how an onlooker, seeing a group of you drinking as you were, can feel threatened?' It evoked a hesitant 'yes' from the interviewee.
Needless to say, this approach isn't always effective. At the very least though it does stop young drinkers in their tracks and makes them think, it does make sure that their parents know what is going on, and it doesn't give them a criminal record for a single act of foolishness.
West Lothian Police claim that it does much more than that. They say that, as a result of their campaign, there is 40 percent less juvenile drinking in their area. That, I think, is a result of which to be proud.
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Communal Composting?
I was once an enthusiastic gardener, systematically composting all kitchen and other organic waste to feed back into the land. I would regularly collect sackfuls of seaweed from Clacton's beaches to enrich my compost bins. It was to this that I attributed my always successful (well, almost always successful!) sweet peas, runner beans, garden peas and courgettes.
Sadly age and arthritis have deprived me of my former gardening activities. Material that I would once have taken down the garden to the compost bin now goes into the black plastic bag for the council's refuse collectors.
If however a £1.25 million (give or take a few thousand!) scheme put forward by Tendring Council gets the go-ahead from Essex County Council, I may yet find myself saving my kitchen waste for recycling, though not in my own bins. The Council wants to build an anaerobic digestion plant to which such waste would be taken for processing after being collected by the council as an addition to the current refuse collection and recyclable waste services.
A local farmer has given his consent for the plant to be built on his land and the scheme would thus have the added advantage of reducing the distances from collection to disposal point. The process of anaerobic digestion, in which friendly bacteria (bacteria without which animal and plant life on earth could not exist), are used to speed up and control the natural processes of decomposition, speedily reducing organic waste to its chemical constituents for feeding back into the land; the very best form of recycling. What's more, the process would take place in a completely enclosed vessel, eliminating any possibility of unpleasant smells.
It is estimated that, with this installation, Tendring's recycling rate would increase to 36 percent, not only well above our present rate, but well above the target of 24 percent set for us by the Department for the Environment.
The County Council has expressed interest in the scheme and is taking it back to its Waste Management Advisory Board for further consideration. I hope that they'll give it their urgent consideration, and approval. This is a scheme that will enable flat dwellers and those, like myself, who are no longer gardeners, to play a full part in slowing down the inexorable progress of global warming while, at the same time, enriching the soil of our land. It certainly has my unequivocal support.
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A Straw in the Wind?
A few weeks ago, in this column, I remarked that it is when the electorate becomes bored and disillusioned with the traditional political parties, that we should beware the rise of a twenty-first century Anglo-Saxon version of the young Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, promising to sweep away the tired old politics and lead us into a new all-British earthly paradise. Remember where such a leader led the Italians and the Germans!
I was reminded of this warning by a letter published in last week's (29 May) Clacton Gazette. It was from a Mr Michael Daniels of Holland-on-Sea who had moved to the Tendring District from the London area twenty-three years ago 'to escape from the ever-worsening situation of living in or close to London'. Here he found a pleasant coastal region marred only by coming 'under the aegis of a second rate, third rate in many respects, ramshackle civic authority' under which, during the time he had been here, 'we have had to endure what we see as a clear example of ever-worsening maladministration'. It is, he says, no surprise at all that electors stay at home and bemoan the situation rather than, 'dutifully putting a cross against the tired old candidates of the old gang'.
However, he bids us to be of good cheer because he can now see a 'glimmer of hope for better times…………right across these once-sceptred isles, many branches of the British National Party are springing up – we've just secured a seat on the important Greater London Assembly …………OK the BNP is newly on the ground in Tendring – no council representation as of yet, but the party is nationally on a roll, and the same applies in north-east Essex'.
He concludes; 'Take heart and soon you'll be hearing much more from our local patriots of the BNP – that's a promise'.
Well, that's something to look forward to! Actually I have heard it all before in the mid and late 1930s, from members of the B.U.F (British Union of Fascists and National Socialists) – better known as 'Mosley's Blackshirts'. Their leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, came to Ipswich during that period and, as a teenager, I attended a meeting that he addressed in the Ipswich Public Hall. The hall was packed and when he stepped onto the stage perhaps as many as twenty misguided Ipswichians leapt to their feet and gave him the outstretched arm fascist salute!
He was, I have to admit, a very forceful and charismatic speaker but, as we know, for all that he got nowhere. I am very glad that, unless someone has been hiding his false light under a bushel, the BNP has so far no one of his calibre (never mind of the calibre of Mussolini or Hitler) to lead us all to disaster.
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The Elusive Apostrophe!
Many people, including some who could give instant answers to mathematical problems at which I would only be able to stare blankly, find it difficult to know where and when to use apostrophes. Should these, as was suggested on a recent BBCtv 'Breakfast programme', be abolished?
I don't think so. I'm sure that no reader of Tendring Topics…..on Line will wish me to embark on an English grammar lesson. I hope though that the following makes clear why it is that the English language would be poorer and less versatile without it.
Fruit and vegetables for sale (particularly on greengrocers' pavement displays!) with names which, in the plural, end with 's´ should never have an added apostrophe either before or after the final 's'.
An apostrophe should be used with its only when this word is used as an abbreviation for 'It is' as in 'It's a cold day today'.
The bungalow in which I live is an old person's home because I am an old person living in it alone. If (which Heaven forbid!) I shared it with one or more similarly elderly people it would become an old persons' home. It could then alternatively be correctly described as an old people's home, though this has generally come to mean a home commercially provided for the residence and care of a number of old people. Old peoples' home (with the apostrophe after the s) is incorrect and meaningless. Peoples, without any apostrophe at all, means a number of different races as, for instance, The peoples of Africa or The peoples of Asia.
Clear? Well, in a world that I find increasingly bewildering, it's quite clear to me!
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