Week 42.08

                           Tendring Topics……on Line

 

Prayers before Debate?

 

            Members of the House of Commons begin their proceedings with prayer.   Tendring District Councillors begin their Council Meetings with prayer.  How extraordinary that there should have been such an acrimonious debate over whether or not Frinton and Walton Town Council Meetings should begin with prayer.

 

            'Keep God out of it!' thundered a headline in the Frinton and Walton Gazette. It was quoting Town Councillor Evans who, determined not to have prayers before debate, had described religion as 'mumbo jumbo claptrap'.  In defence of religion, Olive Dent said in the columns of the Gazette a week later that the world would be a better place if the ten commandments were adhered to.   This evoked a response from Norman Jacobs of Clacton in which he quoted no less than six separate verses in the Old Testament that advocate or condone courses of action that would clearly not make the world a better place.

 

            It was, I presume, Christian prayer that was proposed as an introduction to Frinton and Walton's Council meetings, and the Christian religion that was being attacked and defended in the correspondence columns of the Gazette.  Why ever then was it that both defenders and attackers went back to the Old Testament for their arguments, rather than the New? The latter fulfils the promises of the Old and proclaims a Gospel of love, forgiveness and reconciliation rather than one of prohibited activities and dire punishments.

 

 Jesus Christ said that the first and greatest commandment was that we should love God with all our heart and mind and strength and the second was very similar, that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves. The first of these surely includes a demand that we cherish the works of God in the natural world that we see all around us; and the second that we care for the needs of our fellow men and women.   Those, I think, are precisely the ultimate aims of every public authority and it seems absolutely right to pray, at the beginning of their meetings, that members should be guided to pursue those aims honestly and wholeheartedly.

 

Jesus also said that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament 'The Law and the Prophets' could be summed up as 'Treat other people in exactly the same way that you yourself would wish to be treated'.   I have no doubt that the converse is at least equally true 'Do not treat other people as you would hate other people to treat you'.  I think it unlikely that either Town Councillor Evans or Norman Jacobs would really like their deeply held beliefs to be publicly derided as 'mumbo jumbo claptrap'.

 

Oh yes – I believe that Frinton and Walton Town Council did decide that their meetings should begin with prayer.  I'm glad about that.

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                    …………….where Angels fear to tread

 

            Angels, I am inclined to think, tread with extreme care when discussing the current world financial crisis!  So many assessments have been found to be flawed; so many confident prophecies confounded by events.  Less than a year ago, with the spiralling rise in house prices beginning to decline, those-who-ought-to-know assured us that though house price inflation might well decrease to a more realistic level, there was no possibility of prices actually falling, no risk of home buyers falling into negative equity as in the '90s.

           

            Who would have forecast that the giant HBOS would get into financial difficulties?  Certainly not me!  I had inherited some HBOS shares and my first  (and last!) venture into the stock market had been to accept the 'special offer' to existing shareholders of a limited number of additional shares at what was then a low price.

 

A cynical relative of mine (oh dear! Is it possible that cynicism can be inherited?) suggests that the principal skill required by 'financial experts' is the ability to multiply by twelve.  They look at trends during the current month and predict that they'll develop in much the same way for the coming year.  Quite often they do, and they rarely vary sufficiently widely from the prediction to attract much notice.  This year they most certainly have though and, as a result, thousands are likely to find themselves jobless and homeless.

 

I am not a financial expert but, like my parents, I have a profound dislike of debt.   'If you want something badly – save up for it', they used to tell me.  I well remember the long discussion they had before they hesitantly bought a new radio on HP.  Whenever Heather and I owed money, on our mortgage or to buy a car for work for instance, we paid it off at the very earliest opportunity. We sold Heather's engagement ring to raise the deposit we needed for the bungalow in which I am living now.  Only my son could tell you whether or not he would have still gone to Cambridge had it involved him in the debt with which students are burdened today.  We certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to go.

 

            For years I have been convinced that there was something wrong with the 'buy now, pay later' culture of 100 percent (or even 125 percent) mortgages, multiple credit cards and crushing student debt.  I have said so again and again in Tendring Topics on line and in print.  It would, I thought, 'end in tears'.  And so it has.

 

            Similarly I have never believed that vital public services are best provided by private enterprise, by competing entrepreneurs whose duty to their shareholders demands that they should seek the highest price they can get for the least that they can get away with.  I must confess though that it hadn't occurred to me for one moment that it would be the world's financial services that would first collapse!   Weren't those services the very foundation stone of our society, run by super-humans who could demand incomes of millions a year; the 'going rate', we were told, for those with the exceptional skills that they possessed.  They weren't clever enough though, were they?

            No, I have no idea whether the measures that the government is taking will get us out of the mess we are in.  I can only hope so.  I hope too that we will all have learned that a society in debt is a society in trouble, and that the laws of the market place do not necessarily offer a cure for all the world's economic ills.

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                                     All Hallowe'en

 

            I wonder how many children and adults disguising themselves as witches, warlocks and skeletons, and enjoying themselves at Halloween Parties realize that their Halloween is actually 'All Hallows Eve', the eve of All Saints Day.  Not many, I imagine, and even fewer care.

 

            Not, of course, that the witches and demons have anything to do with the saints. Halloween, as it is generally celebrated, is a revival of an old pagan festival of the dead which the Christian Church tried, not very successfully, to transform into a celebration of the lives of the thousands of Christian saints and martyrs.

 

            I'm not one of the fundamentalist Christians who condemn all traditional celebration of Halloween as being a dangerous revival of Satanism or Devil Worship.  That certainly isn't the intention of the revellers and I credit God with being capable of discerning that intention.   It may even be a good thing, just once a year, to have experience of the ignorance, superstition and fear that ruled our land before the advent of the Christian Faith.   Apple dipping and similar rituals are surely harmless enough.

 

            A practice that I do deplore though is the obnoxious 'Trick or Treat'.   I understand that in the USA, from whence 'Trick or Treat' has come to us, householders have some candies (sweets) or cookies (biscuits) handy as treats for their juvenile callers. I don't think that in this country many make similar provision.  In any case, I am not at all sure that that is what our home-grown trick or treaters want.  Many, I think, are just looking for an excuse to hurl an egg at the front door or the car parked in the driveway, or to pour flour into the porch of those who refuse, or are too bewildered, to provide an instant 'treat'. 

 

            The 'Coast Gazette' in co-operation with the Essex Police has produced a tear-out poster to be displayed in the windows those who don't want to be bothered with trick or treaters:  SORRY, NO TRICK OR TREATERS.  It is a well-meaning idea and I hope that it works.  I think that it would deter genuine young children, who possibly set out on their Halloween adventures with their parents.  I reckon though that it would just serve as a target for those out to cause mischief.

 

            I'd think twice about putting one in my window.

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                                    The NHS again

 

            My ear is healing nicely and I'm looking forward to having the stitches out in about a week's time.  Once again though, the apparent ignorance of the NHS's right hand of what its left hand is doing, has produced a minor flaw in an operation that was otherwise beyond criticism.

 

            You may recall that when I first required NHS transport to take me to Chelmsford to see the consultant about my ear, I was told that my own doctor's practice would make the arrangements.  That was incorrect.  I did get the transport in the end, and it was very satisfactory.  However it involved me in a great deal of unnecessary phoning and frustration that might have reduced someone less determined and less experienced in the ways of bureaucracy, to impotent despair.

 

            This time it is the removal of the stitches.  At the hospital I was told to contact  my local doctor's practice nurse to arrange an appointment for this in about a fortnight.  I was given an envelope addressed to 'the practice nurse' to hand over when I saw her.  Last week I phoned the nurse to arrange for my annual 'flu jab and asked if I could make an appointment for the removal of the stitches at the same time.

 

            I was told, 'Oh no, we don't do that. Just go along to the Minor Injuries  (formerly 'Accidents and Emergencies') Department at Clacton Hospital and the nurse there will do it for you'.   I can get there as easily as I can get to my local medical practice. It is therefore only a 'minor flaw' provided, of course, that when I get there they don't say, 'We don't do that here.  Weren't you told to go to your own medical practice nurse to have the stitches removed?'

 

            You'd really think, wouldn't you, that there would be a clear demarcation line, understood by all involved, between functions that are the responsibility of the hospital authority and those that the local medical practice is expected to perform.

 

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