Week 48.08

                          Tendring Topics……on Line

 

                         'The Bells of waiting Advent ring'*

 

            Next Sunday, 30^th November, is Advent Sunday, the beginning of the period in which the Christian Church prepares to celebrate the birthday of its founder. It is also the beginning of the Church's year. When I post this blog, on Thursday 27^th November, it will be exactly four weeks to Christmas Day. I hope therefore that I may be forgiven for giving over this blog almost entirely to Christmas issues. 

 

If therefore you are a modern follower of the early and unredeemed Ebenezer Scrooge, and are inclined to say  'Bah, Humbug!' when Christmas is mentioned, now might be a good time to switch off.

 

It must have been at this time of the year, sometime in the 1980s, that I was asked to provide about 1,000 words on the origins of Christmas for an Evening Gazette Christmas supplement.   Like the reliable hack that I was, I duly obliged and the article subsequently appeared.  I came across a copy of it recently, and still quite like it. Thirty-plus years on from the 1980s and with Christmas just round the corner, it occurred to me that blog readers might like it too.

 

            The first sentence dates it a bit I'm afraid.  If I were writing today it would surely refer to 'Dr. Who's Tardis' rather than  'A Wellsian time machine!'

 

*From 'Christmas' by John Betjeman

 

Origins of Christmas

           

If, by means of a Wellsian time machine, you were able to eavesdrop on the conversation in a Roman household, at this time of the year, but about two thousand years ago, you might (provided, of course, that you were familiar with colloquial First Century BC Latin!) have heard a conversation strikingly similar to family conversations going on in thousands of British homes today.

 

            'So that's settled then.  We'll give young Marcus a new hunting bow and, if you're sure it won't make her vainer than she is already, we'll give Antonia a pair of jewelled sandals.   How about Aunt Drusilla?  Yes, I know she's an old dragon but she is very good to the children and she does let us use that seaside villa of hers at Herculaneum….'

 

            And, if your time machine were able to penetrate the forests and swamps of north-western Europe where most of our ancestors originated, you'd have found barbarian tribesmen cutting down holly and ivy to decorate the Jarl's great hall for the coming feast, selecting and hauling in the Yule log for his hearth and choosing the fattest pigs for slaughter.

 

            They weren't preparing for Christmas, of course.  The Christian era was yet to dawn.  They were preparing for pagan festivals, in some ways startlingly similar to our own Christmas ones, that marked the end of the year.

 

            From very earliest times mankind has celebrated the time of the year when the sun ceased to set a little earlier every afternoon and to rise a little later every morning; when it became clear that the days were going to lengthen again and that, although still months away, the warmth and the colour of spring were on their way.

 

            It is difficult for us to appreciate that for tens of thousands of years our ancestors could never be quite certain that the days wouldn't continue to shorten until the sun disappeared altogether and the earth was plunged into eternal night.   The very first sign of a lengthening day was an event to celebrate, and for which to thank the gods.

 

            So, the Romans celebrated Saturnalia with feasting and the giving of gifts, and the Germanic and Norse tribes of northern Europe made merry at Yule.  Everyone knew that Yule was the time when the gods themselves walked the earth.  No-one would have been surprised if, when the feasting was at its height, and the ale flowed freely, there had been a thunderous knocking on the doors of the Hall and Woden himself, the All-Father, had been found standing there, demanding the Jarl's hospitality.  They'd have recognised him all right in his human guise.  He would have appeared as a one-eyed old man with a broad brimmed hat and a staff.  His two raven messengers Hugin and Mugin would have been perched on his shoulders and his eight-legged steed would have been trampling down the frozen snow outside.

 

            It is said that at the time of the Nativity of Christ, fishermen in the Mediterranean heard a voice from heaven crying in anguish 'Great Pan is dead!'  But although the old gods died and began to be forgotten with the dawn of the Christian era, the festivals held in their honour, in the spring, at harvest time and at the time of the return of the sun after the darkest days of winter, remained.

 

            It says much for the strength of those folk memories, and for the wisdom of the early Christian Church, that the old feasts and thanksgivings were not destroyed but were transmuted to serve the cause of the new religion.  The spring festival for instance, still retaining a name derived from Eostre, the Teutonic goddess of dawn, became Easter, the Christian festival of the dawn of hope of eternal life. 

 

            No-one knows the time of the year at which Jesus Christ was born, though modern scholarship suggests that it was unlikely to have been 'in the bleak midwinter'.  In the first centuries of the Christian era the birth of Jesus was celebrated at different times of the year by different branches of the Church, by some in January, by others in May.

 

            It was not for many years that our own familiar date of December 25^th was settled upon, but what more appropriate date could have been found?  The birth of Jesus signified the birth of hope for Christians in the same way that the first indications of the lengthening day had signified hope of the spring to the pagans.

 

            The festival coincided with Saturnalia when the Romans gave gifts and reversed the roles of master and slave;  'He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek'.  It coincided too with Yule.  The advent of the Son of God came at a time when the old gods had been accustomed to take on human guise and walk the earth.

 

            Thus did Christianity adapt and purify for its own purposes, festivals that from the beginning of time had expressed some of mankind's most deeply embedded spiritual instincts.

 

            If I were to rewrite that article today I might though be inclined to add the conviction of C.S.Lewis, Christian propagandist and author of the 'Narnia' children's stories, that the Christian Gospel was the fulfilment of the pagan religions of Europe as well as of the religion of the Hebrews.  I'm not sufficiently scholarly to know whether or not that conviction was justified.  I would certainly like it to be!

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Christmas Stamps

 

            I always await the arrival of the Royal Mail's special Christmas stamps with interest.  They are currently on sale and in use. What a pity that this year, once again, they carry only the secondary characteristics of Christmas, not the one that distinguishes it from all other of the commemorations that punctuate the year.  The pantomime characters are colourful and well produced but they really illustrate only a very minor element in the Christmas that most of us celebrate.

 

            What is wrong with the real Christmas story; the story of the temporarily homeless couple who found shelter in a 'lowly cattle shed' where the teenage mum gave birth to her baby boy; of the Palestinian shepherds who experienced an angelic visitation; of the Magi who brought them gifts; and of the family's flight, as political refugees, to neighbouring Egypt?

 

            Whether you are religious or not, whether you are Christian or not, this story has surely never been more relevant than it is today.   Is homelessness outside our experience, with the number of dispossessed householders rising week by week?  Do we have no children born in squalid surroundings?  Are we totally unacquainted with political refugees?

 

            The reason for the secularisation of our Christmas stamps is presumably the notion that we now live in a secular multi-faith country in which Christians are in a minority.   That simply isn't true.  Remember that at the last census, seventy percent of those who responded described themselves as Christian.  Can the National Secular Society; can any political party; assert that that proportion of the population proclaims itself to be their supporters?  

 

            I believe that I live in a still-Christian country in which adherents of every other faith who are prepared to accept our laws are not merely tolerated but welcomed.  I do not believe that we show 'respect' for other faiths by remaining mute about our own.  

 

            I don't believe that followers of other religions do object to Christian imagery on our postage stamps.  Why should they?  What is offensive in a picture of a young mother with her baby, of an angelic visitation (angels are common to all the main religions) or of 'wise men' on camels?    Should anyone really feel strongly about such images I am sure that there are plenty of ordinary, non-Christmas stamps available for them to use.

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                       A Christmas Present from the Chancellor?

 

            I welcome the Chancellor's measures aimed at alleviating the financial crisis and very much hope, as I am sure everyone does, that they will prove successful.

 

            Will they though? I am pleased to see a reduction in VAT, a tax that disproportionately affects the poor, but I doubt if a temporary reduction of 2.5 percent (tuppence-ha'penny in the pound!) is going to have much effect.  I think that it would take something like a ten percent reduction to make anyone decide (as was suggested on tv) to go out and buy an expensive new sports car or, rather more probably I think, a new winter coat, or a bicycle to get to work, or to have that noisy and inefficient boiler in the kitchen attended to.

 

            However, coupled with some income tax changes benefiting pensioners and others with only modest incomes, it may encourage some of us to make purchases and arrange for services that are badly needed but that we had been wondering if we could really afford.  Perhaps there will be enough of us to make a difference.  I hope so.

 

            I am pleased to note that when it comes to pay-back time the Chancellor is proposing to take one small step towards closing that yawning gap between the incomes of the seriously wealthy and the rest of us; the widest gap, I understand, in the whole of western Europe. There is still more to be done.

 

            It is well known that the very rich employ clever lawyers and accountants to exploit loopholes in the law that exempt their clients from paying even the relatively small amount of tax demanded of them.  I suggest that the government should seek even cleverer lawyers and accountants to plug those loopholes!

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                                     The Nature of Art

 

            'Was it a good idea for £40,000 to be spent on the work of art recently unveiled in Jaywick?' asks the Coast Gazette.  I'd like to ask a more basic question. Can the wooden skeleton of a structure that needs only a few sheets of roofing-felt to convert it into a roomy but rather basic poultry shed, possibly be art? Perhaps it can, since the word now encompasses an unmade bed and a sheep's carcase.  If Gainsborough and Constable, never mind Rembrandt and Michael Angelo, learned what nowadays passes for art they would surely be spinning in their graves!

 

            Anyone with £40,000 to spend on art is hereby invited to visit my driveway on any Monday afternoon. There they'll see unveiled and awaiting collection, the skilful juxtaposition of a half filled black plastic bag of refuse and an almost overflowing green salvage collection box, an arrangement challengingly symbolising waste (the plastic bag) and husbandry (the green box); a powerful image with a message for our times, surely worthy of the Turner Prize.  I expect it would be disqualified though.  My weekly produced work of art isn't totally devoid of purpose and meaning!

 

 

 

Week 47.08

                            Tendring Topics …..on Line

 

'Worse than being in jail?'

 

            I was shocked when I saw the headline Life on estate is 'worse than jail' on the front page of the Clacton Gazette and discovered that it referred to Clacton's Percy King Estate. 

 

            When I was the town's Housing Manager, admittedly 35 years ago, the Percy King had been Clacton's pride and joy.  It was relatively new and still developing.  Long-standing tenants from other of our estates begged to be transferred there. When the council was trying to entice a large firm from another district to our area, the Percy King was the estate on which their 'key workers' wanted to be housed.

 

            A few years later when I was Tendring's Public Relations Officer, we had a visitor from Virginia, USA.  He was involved with local government over there and was keen to learn all about local administration in this country.  I escorted him to Council and Committee meetings and drove him round the district, showing him our holiday beaches, the tree planting programme that we had at that time, and the Percy King Housing Estate.

 

            He was deeply admiring of everything that I showed him.   He felt that our councillors were much more altruistic than theirs and that our council housing estates and, in particular, the Percy King Estate were vastly superior to what he called their 'public housing'.  He admired the small and generally well-kept gardens, the neatly curtained windows and (I can hardly believe this was true, but it was in those days) the relative absence of litter and the general tidiness of the still-developing estate.

 

            All this, of course, was before the 'right to buy' legislation.  Tendring Council at that time, like the Clacton Council before it, was Conservative controlled but did not sell its council houses.  These it was felt were held in trust, having been bequeathed by earlier generations of councillors who had acted to eliminate homelessness, overcrowding, and substandard housing in the area.  It was the duty of each successive generation to conserve and add to the housing stock created by its forefathers.

 

            Right-to-buy and the chimera of 'home ownership for all' changed all that.  Everyone aspired to becoming a homeowner.  Councils were compelled to sell off their inheritance at a fraction of its real value, robbing the community of a valuable asset.

 

 The better council houses were snapped up by their tenants at bargain-basement prices.  The less attractive houses and the blocks of flats remained in council control; the poorer and less advantaged tenants remained in them.  It is hardly surprising that they began to deteriorate, as it seems the Percy King Estate has done.

           

            I find it sad that a publicly-owned housing estate, of which we once had reason to be proud, should have descended into the condition so graphically described to me by that visitor from Virginia some thirty years ago.

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                                     The NHS responds

 

            Regular readers of this blog may recall that I had problems with the follow-up on both the operation for my cataract and those on my ear earlier this year.   The follow-up visit after my cataract had been dealt with was promised to be at Clacton Hospital six weeks after the operation.  In fact it took place in Colchester eight or nine weeks after the op. and then only after I had phoned and asked for an urgent appointment because of a sight problem that I was still experiencing.

 

            After my second ear operation I was told to report to my own doctor's practice nurse a fortnight after the operation to have the stitches removed.  When I did this I was informed that she didn't remove stitches and that I would have to go to the minor injuries department of Clacton Hospital to have this done.   I duly turned up at the minor injuries department at 9.00 a.m. to be told that they removed stitches only between 2.00 p.m. and 3.30 p.m.   Luckily for me the nurse heard my conversation with the receptionist and, as she wasn't busy, removed the stitches there and then.

 

            I felt that other octogenarians in a similar position might not have been able to cope as well as I did.  I therefore wrote a polite emailed letter to the Hospital Authorities explaining the circumstances and saying that I had been very pleased indeed with the treatment that I had received both with my eye and my ear but that I felt that communication between the Hospital and the 'outside world' was a good deal less than perfect.

 

            I had hardly expected to hear another word from them but I have received an equally courteous email that made it clear that my comments had been thoroughly investigated and dealt with. I think it unlikely that any other patient will have to suffer the same inconvenience that I did. You may like to read their emailed reply:

 

Hello Mr Hall,

 

 I was asked to investigate the issues you raised in your email dated 31st October regarding your ophthalmology follow-up and suture removal. I have discussed the points you have raised with the managers for each of the areas and they have reported the following to me:

Ophthalmology follow-up - All patients requiring a follow-up appointment are registered on the electronic booking system as well as the timeframes the surgeon has requested for the patient to be followed up in. All departments are informed on a weekly basis the outstanding number of appointments to be booked to enable them to identify the number of clinics that need to be planned. This normally works well, however ophthalmology have been experiencing difficulties in providing sufficient clinic appointments as there has been a reduction in the number of doctors. One doctor has retired and another has left. The ophthalmology department are advertising vacant posts and have approached medical agencies for locum doctors however this has been unsuccessful. The clinics in Clacton Hospital have not ceased completely, however they have been reduced due to the reduction in the number of doctors available to do clinics. Patients are experiencing a delay on average of about 4 weeks. Patients should be informed of the delay at the time of leaving the department and advised that if they are experiencing any complications or deterioration in their condition they should contact their GP direct for review and fast track referral to the hospital if required. It is obvious from your email that this information is not being communicated. I have therefore spoken to the nurse manager within ophthalmology to ensure that this process is put in place.

Post-operative suture removal - The nurse who discharged you from the day unit did not normally work in this department and there was no system in place to ensure that temporary staff were giving the correct information regarding suture removal to patients. All the regular ward nurses are aware that any Tendring patient should automatically get asked to attend Clacton Hospital Mon - Fri 2-3.30. Patients are normally issued with a district nurse form with an additional note stapled to it, which gives the opening times of the dressings clinic and contact number. In order to avoid this happening again, a prompting card has been put in place to aid any bank nurses with this task.

I am very sorry you have been inconvenienced, bad enough once, but to have happened twice, is very disheartening for you and the Trust staff striving to provide a first class service. I am very grateful you have taken the time to bring these issues to my attention and enabled me to rectify two administrative errors.

Kind regards
Linda Moncur                                                                                             
Service Manager Ambulatory Care
Colchester Hospital University Foundation Trust

            The above, I think, demonstrates that politely drawing attention to any aspect of NHS service that you feel is below standard is well worthwhile.

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Essex County Council Ltd?

            Essex County Council sometimes gives the impression of being not only geographically remote from us but at least equally remote from common sense.  I think, for instance, of their selling off their old people's care homes, sending some of their members expensively half way round the world to undertake public relations jobs for Essex commercial enterprises that Essex commercial enterprise should be well able to undertake for itself, and distributing circulars to us informing us that we will be receiving another circular from them!  Against such decisions as these I try to balance the occasional sensible and enlightened one like taking over post offices which if left to commercial interests would have been closed, leaving whole communities without an essential public service.

            Their latest exploit (carried out it seems by the ruling political party without bothering to inform opposition members) is to attempt the privatisation of virtually the whole of the County Council's services.  They have offered on the internet an eight year contract worth up to £5.4 billion pounds for, in the first instance, privatising their 'back office' functions. However core services like libraries and education would also be covered by the contract and no limits have been set on what can be considered.   Hardly surprisingly the opposition, when they discovered from the press what was going on, warned that the proposed sell-out would jeopardise 39,000 jobs and compromise the decision-making power of councillors.

            I find the timing of this initiative even more astonishing than its content.   I would have thought that events over the past year had conclusively demolished the myth that anything that is done by a public authority can be performed better, more efficiently and more economically by private enterprise.  Remember the giant international corporation that took over the marking of all those school examination papers; and failed to deliver.  I believe that there are schools that, to this day, have not received their exam results.  Just this week we have heard that the private company awarded the contract for making sure that the least-well-off university students received their grants had failed to do so. They have had the contract taken away from them.  That doesn't help those impecunious students who are nearing the end of their first term without having received a penny.   It may well be that a substantial number have already dropped out.

            Then there's the credit crunch, largely the result of thoroughly irresponsible lending by high-flying entrepreneurs in the field of banking. These justify their astronomical salaries and bonuses by their brilliant financial acumen and their being prepared to take risks. They're not as clever as they thought and we tend to overlook the fact that the risks that they take are usually with our money.   I doubt if over Christmas many of them will be without a roof over their heads and wondering where the next meal is coming from.

            Even President George Bush, the arch-apostle of the global market and of untrammelled free enterprise, has had to pump millions of dollars (American tax-payers' money!) into failing commercial and industrial enterprises in an attempt to keep them afloat. 

            We in Essex may at least be thankful that it won't be long before there's a County Council election.  I hope that every eligible voter will make sure that his or her name is on the electoral register.

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Week 46.08

                            Tendring Topics……..on Line

 

Oasis to SnOasis?

 

   After Heather and I were married in April 1946 our first real home (I don't include furnished rooms in that category) was a bungalow in the rural parish of Barham, three or four miles northwest of Ipswich.  It was one of a group of five bungalows that had been converted from a redundant Isolation (infectious diseases) Hospital, to house members of the staff of the Gipping Rural District Council.  There we lived from the New Year of 1948 until our move to the Clacton area in 1955.

 

As this little group of bungalows had once been an Isolation Hospital, its site was quiet for the sake of the patients, and remote from other properties to reduce the risk of the spread of infection.   We were sufficiently distant from the main Ipswich to Norwich Road to be unaffected by the sound of its traffic.  Behind us stretched a stony, rabbit infested waste called The Broom, through which ran a railway line with an uncontrolled pedestrian level crossing.  Then, perhaps half a mile distant from our home, was a footbridge over the River Gipping which led to the sleepy village of Great Blakenham on the road from Ipswich to Stowmarket.

 

We lived in an oasis of peace and tranquillity in a world that even then, was becoming daily noisier and more intrusive.

 

I went back there recently, after a lapse of over fifty years.  A busy motorway now divided the approach lane into two separate parts, making the former hospital site even more remote from the former main road.  There had clearly been gravel workings on the Broom. A worked-out gravel pit was now a small lake, planted about with trees and offering reserved fishing.  There was an official picnic site nearby.  The group of bungalows in which we had lived had had only names in our day – ours we had named 'Broomside'.  Now there were wooden gates giving access from the lane. On them were prosaic numbers.  Our 'Broomside' had become 'No. 5, The Crescent'.

  

Still though, the site retained something of the atmosphere of tranquillity that I remembered from the late '40s and early '50s.

 

That, I think, is likely to change dramatically in the near future. About a mile away across the river in the parish of Great Blakenham, is to be built an enormous leisure complex that will, I am sure, have a marked impact on economic and social life throughout the whole of southern East Anglia.  I shall be very surprised if its effect (a positive one I hope) isn't felt along our Essex holiday coast.

 

Last week SnOasis, a unique indoor winter-sport and general leisure centre, with a cost estimated at £350 million, received its approval from the Government.  Work, on a development site the size of 195 football pitches, is likely to begin shortly.   Its features will include a 415 metre long ski slope (with real snow!) with a 100 metre vertical drop, that will be capable of coping with 2,400 skiers per hour, a nursery slope, a 100 metre drop full-length bobsleigh track, an ice rink, a speed skating track, an ice climbing wall and a cross-country ski run, plus a multi-purpose sports hall, triathlon course, roller-blade track, swimming pool, a ten-pin bowling hall with 20 lanes, tennis courts, and fishing facilities.

 

Also on the site will be a 350 room 4-star hotel and a self-catering holiday village with 350 units and 100 holiday apartments.  It will have its own main-line railway station linking Great Blakenham to London Liverpool Street, and of course, there will be enormous car parks.  It will, claim the developers, be the world's very first indoor winter sports resort.  Construction will employ 3,500 jobs and, once it is up and running it is estimated that it will provide the equivalent of 1,800 full-time jobs.

 

It is expected to be completed by 2,012 and it is hoped that it will attract 650,000 visitors a year!

 

Now that I am a Clactonian by adoption I can watch the development with interest, hoping that it will reduce East Anglian unemployment and that there may be a spin-off for Tendring's seaside holiday towns.  Ours are, after all, the nearest sandy seaside beaches to Great Blakenham.  They're less than an hour's drive away and the journey doesn't involve driving through traffic-packed Ipswich or even going more than a fraction of the way round its motor-way bypass.

 

I suspect, mind you, that if I were still living in that quiet little cul-de-sac the other side of the river in Barham I'd be one of those protestors prepared to go to the last ditch in an attempt to stop it happening!

 

It certainly puts into perspective all the local fuss about the proposal to provide a few wind turbines between Clacton and St. Osyth!

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Armistice Day

 

            Throughout my childhood and youth 'before the war', 11.00 a.m. on Armistice Day, 11^th November, was a sombre and universally observed time and date every year.   The nearest Sunday, observed nowadays as 'Remembrance Day', was just another Sunday then.   The actual anniversary of the date and time when the guns of World War I fell silent was our special time of remembrance.  It was taken very seriously.

 

             Memories of the carnage of the trenches were still fresh in people's minds.  There were still-young war widows wearing mourning black again for the occasion.  There were those we realized were wounded ex-servicemen, on crutches, with an empty sleeve pinned across their chests, or using a white stick.

 

            All those who had served in the war, and that was a very large proportion of the male population, wore their medals.  My dad would spend a half an hour during the preceding evening polishing his six.  He was particularly proud of the Mons Medal that marked him as one of the original tiny British Expeditionary Force who, according to the poet Alfred Houseman had, in 1914, 'followed their mercenary calling, and took their wages, and are dead', and of a French 'Medaille d'Honneur' which had been accompanied by a certificate signed by the then French President M. Poincaré.

 

            At eleven oclock, the sirens sounded and everything stopped.  Cars stopped on the roads, teachers would stop, with chalk in their fingers, as they were about to write on the blackboard.  Everything went into suspended animation until the sirens sounded again and brought us all back to normal.  Woe to he or she who broke that silence!

 

            After the end of World War II Armistice Day was  replaced by Remembrance Sunday. Acts of remembrance took place at the Cenotaph in London, in churches and at war memorials all over the country.  It wasn't the same though. No longer were there sirens calling the whole nation to silence for just two minutes.   Sunday became steadily less 'special' and church attendances fell.  Attendances at war memorials fell too and many, perhaps the majority, of us no longer kept those two minutes of silence.

 

            This year, perhaps because this Armistice Day, is the 90^th since the day that the guns fell silent on the battle fronts throughout Europe, has seen a reversal of the trend.  There has been tremendous media coverage of memorial events both on Remembrance Sunday and on Armistice Day. BBC tv has been running a series of features on World War I and its millions (yes, millions!) of victims.

 

            Some years ago, in many parts of the country, the British Legion was instrumental in reviving the tradition of commemoration at 11.00 a.m. on 11^th November.  Their members met and observed a two minutes silence, together with prayer and the sounding of the Last Post followed by Reveille. They invited members of the public to join them.  In Clacton this takes place on what is now known as the Town Square, the pedestrian area at the Junction of Pier Avenue and West Avenue.

 

            I'm not a member of the British Legion and I usually go to the Quaker Meeting for Worship on Remembrance Sunday. I have made a practice though of trying to attend that act of remembrance on 11^th November. I went this year and was pleased to note a larger than usual attendance, including many people obviously far too young to remember either of the two World Wars.

 

The new town centre layout meant that the event was less disturbed by traffic than in the past. The ceremony was brief, but moving.  The vicar of St. Paul's Church prayed briefly and there were two short readings. Then, the British Legion standards were lowered as a Bugler sounded the Last Post (always a moving moment for me) and we observed our silence, the end of which was signalled by the joyful sounding of Reveille and the raising again of the flags.

 

            During those silent two minutes I was thinking of the young men I had known who never returned, particularly, because of the blog I had just written, of Gunner Ted Baker, aged 24, who had served on the same Troop of four guns as myself.  He had been fatally wounded, by a splinter from an air-burst shell I believe, during that last lost battle for Tobruk, and had died of his wounds on the following day.  He is buried (Grave Ref. 2.D.14) in Knightsbridge War Cemetery, Acroma, near Tobruk, Libya). 

 

            Ted's home was in Great Blakenham, Suffolk and his next of kin were his parents, Frank and Ella Baker of that village.  His name is inscribed on the war memorial at the village church there. I wondered what he would have thought of the development that is about to transform his rural home and much of the surrounding Suffolk countryside?

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Who'd be a Social Worker?

 

            My grand-daughter is a social worker in the Sheffield area  (I am hoping to go there to see her this weekend!).  I am very proud of her, not least because with her capacity for hard work and her M.A., B.Sc. degrees I am sure that she could have chosen a much more financially rewarding profession had she wished to.

 

            I don't envy her though. We all like to be liked and there can surely be few more vilified occupations.  They are invariably portrayed in fiction as being bossy and totally unsympathetic bureaucrats, revelling in using red tape to entangle and ensnare other people's lives.  No 'realistic' tv series set in modern times is complete without a loving but down-on-her-luck young mum, or a pathetic but independently minded octogenarian tearfully pleading, 'Please don't tell "the social", they'll take the kids off of me', or 'they'll cart me off to one of them homes', as the case may be.

 

            Well, I'm nearer ninety than eighty and have myself had one or two encounters with social workers.   I have found them to be charming ladies, eager to offer help though sometimes constrained by financial considerations from doing so in ways that they, and I, would have liked.  They seemed to be greatly relieved at the fact that, for the moment anyway, I have neither the need nor the inclination to, 'go into a home'.  I am quite sure that their attitude is much the same with struggling young mums.  They would much rather offer them support to stay in their own homes to look after their children, than compulsorily take the children 'into care'.

 

            But that too is a course of action fraught with peril.  Supposing, shortly after a visit from a social worker, I had decided that my life wasn't worth living and attempted to end it or, even less probably I hope, harmed someone else in a fit of senile rage and frustration? Imagine the amateur psychologists at work! 'The social worker should surely have spotted the warning signs; all those photos of his deceased wife about the house, his garrulousness, his obsessive church-going and writing (Tendring Topics, his autobiography, his many emails), his failing sight and physical strength. He was obviously heading for a break-down'.  If she had decided that I did need domiciliary care and had done anything about it, she would have been 'a power-drunk petty official, revelling in taking away a war-veteran's independence'.

 

            When dealing with young mums and their kids the situation is even more fraught with peril.  Take the children into care and you invite pictures in the tabloids of a weeping mother and screaming terrified children.  If the mum is from an ethnic minority the social worker is likely to be accused, at best, of insensitivity to the customs of other cultures, at worst of being 'blatantly racist'.

 

            Fail to take action and, as we have seen just this week, appalling tragedy can result.   For the social worker involved, ten thousand previous correct decisions can't cancel out or even mitigate the effects of just one wrong one.   It is the exception that makes the news!  I admire my granddaughter all the more for the fact that social work is certainly not a profession that I would ever have chosen for myself!

 

Week 45.08

                          Tendring Topics…….on Line

 

               'In Flanders' fields the poppies blow

                             Between the crosses, row on row…..'

 

            So wrote the Canadian World War I poet, Lieut. Col. Dr John McCrae, who was himself to lie beneath one of those crosses before that war came to an end.

 

            On Remembrance Sunday I always ask myself whether to go to our quiet Quaker Meeting for Worship at 10.30 a.m. or to the open-air service of remembrance at Clacton's War memorial.  I served in the army throughout World War II for seven years of my adolescence and early adulthood and I lost good friends in combat, and many more in captivity in North Africa, Italy and Germany.

 

            I find myself deeply moved by the sounding of the Last Post and by the words of Laurence Binyon, always read at Remembrance Services:

 

They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,

We shall remember them.

 

However I expect that I shall finally decide to remember them, as I have done in the past, in the silence of the Quaker Meeting rather than at a semi-military parade.  I always buy and wear a poppy, primarily to show that I haven't forgotten those in my Suffolk Territorial Regiment who never returned to see again those well-loved rivers and cornfields, villages and towns of East Anglia; also though, to support the Earl Haig fund for wounded and disabled service men and women that is the destination of money raised by poppy sales.  They too are the victims of humankind's thirst for war and violence.

 

A number of folk whom I admire and respect will be wearing a white instead of a red poppy to signify their devotion to the cause of peace. At one time in the past, my wife Heather and I each wore both a red and a white one. We too considered ourselves to be peaceniks and had imagined that sales from white poppies supported civilians wounded in conflict, in the same way that red poppy sales support wounded service personnel.  We learned that that is not so.  Proceeds go towards supporting the cause of peace; a thoroughly worthy objective and one that we supported in other ways throughout the year.  We did not think though that it was comparable with supporting injured victims of war.  So we reverted to wearing a red poppy only.

 

I have been very angry when, in the past, I have listened to sermons in which Remembrance Day has been used as a pretext for encouraging recruitment in the forces.  I don't care for it being used for peace propaganda either.  I just want to remember with sadness my friends and to give some thought to the hundreds of thousands of other young lives of every nation on earth that have been squandered on the world's battlefields during the past century, and are still being squandered today.

 

I think it a great pity that another day hasn't been set aside internationally to remember the civilian dead of two world wars and of subsequent conflicts, in the same way that we remember service personnel on Remembrance Sunday.  Then, if the proceeds of the sales of white poppies were going to the support of civilian victims I'd be happy to buy and wear one.

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                                         Recycling again!

 

Sorry to raise the subject of recycling yet again but it really is an important issue for us all.   I'm not a great believer in breast-beating and apologies for mistakes that have been made in the past. Hindsight is a faculty with which we are all well endowed! I am appalled though by the thought of the colossal waste in which we once all indulged without giving it a thought; the acres of paper and cardboard, the mountains of used tin cans, plastic containers, glass bottles and jars, that could have been reused or recycled, but were incinerated or put into landfill instead.

 

            I hope that last week's recycling campaign in Clacton, may have had some effect, even though I think that it was largely preaching to the converted.  Perhaps the fact that more recycling can bring cash benefits, as is made clear by a news story in the current Clacton Gazette, may encourage some.

 

            Recycling, it appears, costs the Tendring District something like £1.2 million a year.  However, for every tonne of waste that is diverted from landfill to recycling the County Council repays £50.82.  From April 1^st to 7^th October this year this sum totalled £444,512 so Tendring Council is well on the way to recovering some £900,000 (the better part of a million!) by the end of the financial year.

 

            The recent well-publicised story of the material that was put out for recycling in our district but ended up on a rubbish tip in India, has certainly dampened local recycling enthusiasm.  Are we all wasting our time and energy just to make profits for some unscrupulous contractor?

 

            These doubts can best be countered by greater openness about what does happen to all that material once it has been bagged or boxed and put out for collection.  Why can't we have a well illustrated article, or series of articles on the subject in 'Tendring Matters', the Council's occasional newsletter, and in the columns of the Clacton Gazette, the Coast Gazette and the East Anglian Daily Times.   Perhaps BBC tv's  Look East could be interested too.

 

            Too boring?  I don't think so.  I don't believe that there is such a thing as a boring subject, just boring speakers, writers or presenters.

 

            For example; we are told that there is no need to separate our recyclables.  Just put the lot, paper, cardboard, tins and plastic into the box and put it out for collection. Fine, but someone has to sort it.  I'd like to know where, when and how it is done, and see pictures of the conveyor belt (or whatever) and of those who do the sorting.  Then each kind of recyclable, tin cans for instance, could be followed though to its final metamorphosis as a tractor, an ambulance… or just more tin cans!   I believe that these are subjects that lend themselves to a number of features that would interest, and I hope reassure, Tendring's sceptical householders.

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'More blessed is it to give……..'

 

            We hear a great deal these days about children being bribed (OK, given cash incentives if you prefer!) to do things that in my childhood we all took for granted:  turning up regularly and punctually to school for instance, refraining from antisocial behaviour, eating healthy food.  Perhaps in my day we behaved ourselves because we knew that we would be punished if we didn't.  We certainly didn't expect to be rewarded for behaving 'normally'.

 

            It came as a very pleasant surprise therefore to hear, on the BBC tv 'Breakfast' programme, of a primary school in Ayrshire in Scotland where the incentive offered to children for eating 'healthy' school meals is not something for themselves but for less fortunate children overseas.   For every school meal that is eaten a child receives a number of points.  These are translated into cash that is used to provide meals, or school equipment, for children in the third world.

 

It was really heart-warming to hear these little Scottish children describe their school meals as 'verry tasty' and to see their obvious pleasure at the thought that they were helping someone less fortunate than themselves.   No wonder Jesus Christ said of a little child, 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven'.

 

These days it takes a good deal to bring a smile to my face on a chilly, damp and dark Monday morning in November.  That news item managed it.

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                                   The American Election

 

            No, I'm afraid that you can't get away from it, even in Tendring Topics…on line.   Even a committed Europhile like myself has to admit that the result of the Presidential election will affect us all.   As I write these words, on Tuesday evening, it will be another twelve hours at least before we can have any sure idea of the victor.

 

            One thing we can be sure of, and thankful for.  It will see the end of a regime whose disastrous foreign policy has led our Government blindly into two unwinnable wars. It is a regime that has exacerbated the international terrorism that it claims to be fighting, has striven to delay and dilute every international effort aimed at combating global warming, and has presided over an economic system that has led the world into its current financial chaos.

 

            Have you watched the tv images of Americans voting?  The long slow-moving queues snaking towards polling stations remind me of those in a third world country enjoying a free election for the first time after years of oppression.   Some of those shuffling forward in the queues spoke of having to wait six, seven, even eight hours to vote.

 

            It might have been thought that a country in which both candidates have, quite literally, spent millions of dollars on their election campaigns would be able to afford a polling system that enabled everyone who is entitled to vote to do so quickly and efficiently. 

           

I notice, by the way, that no American that anyone in this country has ever heard of, (no film star, actor, pop-singer, top politician, industrial or commercial tycoon) is ever interviewed after being spotted in one of those slowly moving queues.  Do American celebrities enjoy special voting privileges? Perhaps though, they don't bother to vote, confident that their chequebooks can attain their aims much more effectively than any mark on a ballot

 

…….and the Outcome!

 

            I didn't stay up all night to learn the election result but I did switch on to BBC radio's World Service whenever I woke up.   The first time was half an hour after midnight, by which time nothing much had happened.   Then again at 3.00 a.m. when the election was definitely going in Obama's favour but the outcome was still uncertain, and finally at 5.00 a.m. when the result was known.

 

            No, I didn't turn over and go back to sleep again.  Despite my disillusion with all politicians. I found myself much too excited to do so.  It was obvious to me that Obama's victory would be welcomed in virtually every country in the world.   'Uncle Sam' would no longer be seen world-wide as a bullying self-righteous monster with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other, and his female equivalent as a gun-toting, moose-shooting, pit bull-terrier with lipstick.

 

            Will Barak Obama really make real progress towards peace in the Middle East and elsewhere?   Will he really take the steps that are urgently needed to halt the accelerating progress of global warming?  Will he really endeavour to spread America's great wealth a little more evenly over all its people and, in doing so, encourage our politicians to do the same?

 

            I am sure that he would like to do all these things.   I hope that he fully realizes the strength of the forces ( fabulously wealthy individuals, giant international corporations,  arms manufacturers and traders) that will be determined to stop him.

 

            For a few years after World War II I fondly imagined that mankind, by the exercise of reason alone, could create an earthly Paradise of peace and plenty for all. I am now quite sure that we can't and that we won't.  I think it just possible though that men and women like Barak Obama can lead us a few faltering steps in the right direction.

 

            I do hope that I'm not going to live to experience yet another disillusion!

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