Tendring Topics…………..on Line
Park and Ride?
The 'Clacton Gazette' headline 'Town to get Park and Ride' puzzled me. Park and Ride Schemes surely operate where retail outlets or other attractions are clustered together the centre of a large town and attract scores of car-driving visitors from elsewhere. The cars are left in large car parks on the outskirts and buses transport their occupants into the town centre for their shopping or other expeditions.
Clacton isn't really like that though. it isn't a large town and sadly perhaps, people don't flock to Clacton from all over southern East Anglia for the town's shopping facilities. For those, they prefer Ipswich or Colchester. The biggest attraction in Clacton for outsiders remains the sea front and the pier. I don't believe that many holiday or day visitors would want to leave their cars at an out-of-town car park and go to their final destination on a bus. Folk who use town centre shopping facilities are mostly people like me. We live within the area but can't, or prefer not to, walk the half-mile or so to the shops. With my mobility scooter (my 'iron horse') I have no problem, but local motorists do need adequate parking in or near the town centre. So do holiday visitors.
It turns out that what the council have in mind is not a 'park and ride' scheme at all but a bus shuttle service linking the out-of-town Clacton Factory Outlet (you may still know it as Clacton Shopping Village!) and the Co-op Supermarket off Oxford Road, with the town centre. Are the proprietors of the car parks for those facilities happy about their being used by shoppers and holiday visitors making for the town centre? They need not worry. It just won't happen!
Another 'bright idea' that the council is considering in an effort to rejuvenate Clacton is to give different parts of the town their own identity like, I suppose, Mayfair for the seriously posh, Harley Street for expensive medicine, the 'East End' for cockneys, Trafalgar Square for demos. and Soho for sleaze!
I quote from the Clacton Gazette: 'Rosemary Road could become known as Restaurant Corner, Pallister Road for its cafés, High Street for experimental culture, Station Road for domestic services, Jackson Road for fashion and Pier Avenue/West Avenue for major brands'.
It's certainly a novel idea and one that would never have occurred to me. Can you see it catching on though?
I did once hear Station Road unkindly referred to as 'The Avenue of the Forty Thieves' because it was the venue of the Town Hall and of many of Clacton's solicitors and estate agents! I don't think though that that's quite the kind of designation that the Council has in mind.
I don't wish to be uncharitable but both the 'park and ride' and the 'streets with their own identity' schemes seem to me like the despairing efforts of someone who desperately wants to restore Clacton's prosperity, but just can't think how to do it!
'It's an ill wind………………..
Thinking back to the days, not so long ago really, when I was writing Tendring Topics (in print) I recall that a recurring theme was that of the nuisance, and the danger, of abandoned cars.
At one time there were two such wrecks, I remember, that I passed every time I drove into Clacton. One was in my own road, the other in St. Osyth Road, less than a quarter of a mile away. They were unsightly. Children explored and played in them, endangering life and limb. They were an obstruction and after dark, a traffic hazard. What was worse nobody, not the Police, nor the District Council, nor the County Council, seemed to have the responsibility of moving them, so they often stayed where they were for weeks.
The absence of once-familiar objects is always much less obvious than their presence! It wasn't until I saw a reference to abandoned cars in the local press that I realized that I hadn't seen one for years. It is true that I don't travel about the district as much as I once did, but I do get around Clacton quite a bit and, from time to time, one or other of my sons takes me further afield. A few years ago there was no need to go looking for abandoned vehicles. They forced themselves on our attention.
The reason for the absence of these, once all too familiar, objects? There are several, including the fact that Tendring District Council now offers a free service for the disposal of unwanted vehicles. Another important factor though, is the rise in the price of such scrap metals as steel, aluminium and copper, all to be found in vehicle bodies, wheels and wiring.
It is said that scrap metal merchants will now pay up to £200 for a vehicle that just a few years ago they would have charged £50 to remove!. I hope, by the way, that Tendring Council is claiming, and obtaining, the going rate for the vehicles that they dispose of!
The rising price of scrap metal has in recent months produced an epidemic of thefts of lead from roofs, and of every kind of removable metal object, from taps and stop-cocks to copper wiring, from domestic, commercial and public buildings.
It seems though that it has also contributed to the reduction of a nuisance and a danger in our streets!
It truly is an ill wind that blows nobody any good!
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'Christmas is coming……'
It is a depressing thought that last Monday (25th August) was the very last Public holiday before Christmas. 'Summer' is all but over and already I notice that the evenings and mornings (I'm generally an early riser!) are getting darker. It is all the more depressing because most of us feel that for the second year in succession we simply haven't had a summer. There have been a very few warm days, a number of pretty chilly and windy ones, lots of rain (though still less for us than for most places in the UK!) and some really violent thunderstorms. We certainly haven't had that one-time annual succession of warm sunny days that, when I was a keen gardener, would have had me praying fervently for a few storm-clouds.
Those who had thought that, whatever disasters global swarming might bring to other people, for us it would mean Mediterranean warmth and sunshine which would bring thousands flocking to our golden beaches must be bitterly disappointed. Our prevailing winds sweep, as before, over the Atlantic Ocean before reaching us. Since they are now warmer than they once were, they have the capacity to collect and hold even greater volumes of water vapour than in the past. This they deposit on the British Isles, giving us 'monsoon' type weather throughout most of the summer.
Surprisingly, our seaside holiday resorts appear not to have done as badly as might have been expected. The weather for Clacton's Carnival Week was decidedly mixed (a friend of mine living on the procession route felt particularly sorry for some bedraggled and soaked-to-the-skin little Brownies that she saw on one of the floats) but was judged by the organisers to be a success. The Air Show too, which enjoyed two days of dry weather, was also a success with an estimated 20,000 spectators over the two days.
Our hotels, boarding houses and holiday caravan sites don't seem to have done too badly either. It may be that the rising cost of air travel and of holidays abroad is forcing more people to holiday in the UK and a great many of them are choosing to come to an area which, if not offering Mediterranean sunshine, is at least drier and sunnier than practically anywhere else on these rather damp and wind-swept islands.
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The Terrible Tudors
No, I'm not referring to the dynasty but to the tv series of that name. It's all very well to say that it's just a tv drama and isn't meant to be a factual documentary. Surely where historical evidence is beyond dispute an effort should be made to stick to the known facts. Today's educational priorities mean that for a great many viewers that series is all that they know and all that they will ever know about the Tudors.
Having a dark haired Henry VIII is bad enough, but then we have a clean shaven Pope and a clean shaven Thomas More (it was he whose last words to his executioner were that his luxurious beard should be spared as it had done nothing to offend the king!). Anne Boleyn is portrayed as no more than a scheming and unprincipled gold digger. Worst of all, Thomas Cranmer (one of the most scholarly of Archbishops and author of the Church of England's incomparable 'Book of Common Prayer) is caricatured as a shallow and timeserving mountebank.
Do you remember the former BBC tv series 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII' and its sequel 'Elizabeth R'? They probably had their anachronisms and historical inaccuracies too but I did feel that they were trying to portray an aspect of historical truth. I can't feel that about 'The Tudors', the principal aim of which seems to be to titillate!
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