Tendring Topics…….on line

A Glimpse into the future?

The above news cutting from a German regional newspaper was sent to me by a friend living in the Black Forest area. It shows a ten-years-older (and wiser) German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, commenting in 2020 on the failure of the Copenhagn Climate-Change Conference to come to a satisfactory concluson. It is doubly prophetic since the newspaper is dated 4th December, before he Conference had even begun!

The print of the caption is, I regret, too small to read on this blog. My ability to read German is distinctly limited. However I have managed to work out that it is headed 'Late Repentance' and goes on to say that this is one of the posters that greeted Angel Merkel, and other national leaders when they arrived at Copenhagen airport for the Conference. It was part of a Greenpeace Poster campaign.

I don't really think that Chancellor Angela Merkel (or Prime Minister Gordon Brown) need be repentant about their roles at Copenhagen, except perhaps that, unlike Greenpeace, neither of them had foreseen inevitable failure.

A Lucky Year?

To ethnic Chinese, ‘eight’ is a lucky number. That, so I am told, is why they were so keen to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Ariel, my elder grandson’s Taiwanese girl-friend was convinced that the year that is coming to an end would be an extremely fortunate one for me. It was the year of my 88th birthday and my house number is also 88!

Myself and Ariel, Grandson Chris’ Taiwanese girlfriend

Actually, I often feel that I have been blest by good luck all my life. No, I have never won the lottery…..but as I have never bought a lottery ticket that is hardly surprising. Over and over again though my life has been punctuated by extraordinary coincidences, and circumstances that seemed to be disasters, but have turned out to be blessings in disguise.

Right -grandson Nick and Romy, his Belgian girlfriend.

2009 isn’t quite over yet, but yes, despite the recession it has so far it has been a good one for me. I had an enjoyable Easter, attending with my daughter-in-law a wonderful Choral Eucharist in Southwark Cathedral that was televised and transmitted on BBC tv. To celebrate my 88 years I visited Brussels with my son and daughter-in-law, to see my grandson Nick who lives and works there. I was introduced to his girl-friend….a charming young lady whose native tongue is French but who also speaks fluent, and virtually unaccented, English. Returning to England for the actual birthday, my son, daughter-in-law and I had a celebratory meal at the very posh Essex pub run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the well-known tv chef.

Left:Me on my 88th birthday.

Right: Jo

AKA Miss Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc.

Later in the year my other son and daughter-in-law drove me Sheffield for a weekend to spend time with my granddaughter, an M.A., B.Sc., of whom I am immensely proud. Still in her mid-twenties she works as a social worker attached to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. We drove out into the Peak District and, for the first time in my life, I was able to see traditional Derbyshire ‘well dressing’.

In July I was able to return to Zittau in Germany for my third (and, I think, final) time since the end of World War II. It was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the town’s restored Lenten Veil (in the 500 year history of which I am believed to have played a tiny part) in its own museum/church of the Holy Cross. Grandson Nick organised the visit and accompanied me. This time I travelled by rail, from London to Brussels by Eurostar and then, with Nick, from Brussels to Dresden with just one change of train at Frankfurt. By booking well in advance we travelled first class at second class prices and, believe me, first class on a German long-distance train really is first class!

Nick drove me from Dresden to Zittau, sixty-odd miles, in a pre-arranged hired car. It was a great pleasure to meet again my friends Dr Volker Dudeck and his wife Julia, and Ingrid Zeibig and her family, including her little niece Maja, now almost three! This time I managed to get to the summit of Mount Oybin, where I had helped take the heavy cases containing the famous Lenten Veil, in February 1945.

From the Left: Ingrid Zeibig, Maja, Ingrid’s mother Frau Ingrid Kulke, Ingrid’s sister-in-law Kornelia (Konnie) and brother Andreas. Konnie’s second baby was born in September; a boy, Tom Friedrich, a brother for Maja.

The view from the summit of Mount Oybin the far distance, swathed in mist, is the town of Zittau.

To my great surprise and pleasure, I was also given by Dr Dudeck proof copies of a long article of mine entitled ‘Return to Zittau’. It had been translated into German and published as a glossy booklet, illustrated with photographs taken locally, and pictures culled from my Flickr web site, www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea More copies of this booklet have since been published and are on sale in the tourist shop at 5€, profits going to the upkeep of the Lenten Veil, which has recently had its 300,000th visitor (an English tourist!) in the ten years that it has been on public display.

Inspired by the German booklet, I am self-publishing a similar booklet entitled ‘Zittau…..and I’ Incorporating my original Return to Zittau’, but with a great deal of additional material and half a dozen or so photographic illustrations. I am having 150 copies printed for family and friends. The typescript has gone to the printer and I hope to have them before the end of January..

Yes, it has been a good year, though I don’t think that ‘all the eights’ has had a great deal to do with it. Those who read this blog a year ago may remember that my New Year Resolution was to ‘count my blessings, count them one by one’. Two thousand-and-nine certainly gave me many to count. As, in two thousand-and-ten I shall, if I am still around, be entering my ninetieth year, I ought perhaps to hope that it will be a little less action-packed!

‘Incapable of running a bath!’……..yet the best in Essex!

It was, of course, our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell who claimed that the previous ‘Clacton First’, non-Conservative coalition administration of Tendring Council, was incapable of running a bath. Not everyone however regards him as the greatest living authority on local and world affairs. Rather more reliable is the Government’s Independent Audit Commission which awarded the Council three out of four for performance, and declared it not only to be the best local authority in Essex, but in the top twenty-five of the two hundred plus local authorities in the country! I wonder what Mr Carswell, who is perhaps best known as a climate change sceptic, and for his purchase (at public expense) of ‘a love seat’ and a £60 kettle for his second home in Thorpe-le-Soken, has to say about all the other Essex authorities. Unlike Tendring Council, several of them invested their tax-payers’ money in high-interest-earning banks in Iceland…..and are now regretting it!

Most of the data on which the Audit Commission’s report was based was garnered during the previous non-Conservative administration of which Mr Carswell was so scathing. Possibly that is why the reaction of the present Council leader, Mr Neil Stock has been distinctly low-key. He praises the Council’s staff (not the Council!) for their hard work but says that the Audit Commission has given a loud and clear message that they still have some serious concerns. The report had pointed out that the council’s public image was poor, with less than half of local people surveyed expressing satisfaction with the way it ran things.

He added encouragingly that the report said that Tendring had ‘a firm foundation for future improvement’ (under Mr Stock’s new Conservative administration of course!)

There are, of course, several reasons why Tendring Council has a poor public image. The current in-fighting between the two, almost equal, opposing Parties doesn’t help. Then again many people imagine that all public services are the responsibility of the district council. Mobility scooter users like myself for instance, are particularly conscious of the atrocious state of many of the pavements away from the town centre. How many, I wonder, realize that these are the responsibility of the Conservative County Council (who received only an ‘adequate’ rating from the Audit Commission) to whom the greater part of our Council Tax is paid. I think that many of Tendring Council’s services, including, for instance the refuse collection and recycling collection services and the street cleansing service, that are second to none.

Then again, for both the local and national press, local government disasters provide much more attractive stories than local government triumphs. The news story about the Audit Commission’s findings is to be found only at the bottom of Page 7 of the Clacton Gazette of 17th December, with the headline, ‘Council staff earn a pat on the back’. I suggest that had Tendring been rated the worst, instead of the best, local authority in Essex, the story would have been on the front page with some such headline as ‘Tendring First’ Council comes Last! and a story about how the new administration was doing its best to clear up the mess left by its predecessor.

Week 52.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Christmas!

I hope that everyone (anyone!) who reads this blog will have a very Happy Christmas and that their New Year will be one of peace and hope. It will not be a very happy one for many people – for the bereaved and lonely for instance (and the kindness and sympathy of friends and relatives may only make that bereavement and loneliness seem even harder to bear!), those rendered homeless or jobless by the recession, and those who know that for any other reason, this Christmas will be a pale shadow of Christmases past.

Those who wish to denigrate the Christian message often point out that the birth of Jesus, if it occurred at all, almost certainly didn’t take place ‘in the bleak midwinter’ and that our Christmas festival is simply an adaptation of much more ancient pagan festivals, Yule for instance in northern Europe and Saturnalia within the Roman Empire.

I have always felt that that supports, rather than impedes, the Christian message. No one knows exactly when in the year Jesus Christ was born. What could be more appropriate though, than to celebrate the advent of the Light of the World just a few days after the shortest day and longest night………when pagans were celebrating the very first indications that the world’s plunge into darkness had halted? The sun was once again returning to restore life and light to all creation. C.S.Lewis, author of the Narnia books, and great Christian scholar, always maintained that God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ was the fulfilment of the pagan religions of Europe as well as that of the people of Israel.

The Nativity story, even if not all historical fact, surely tells us a great deal about the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He was born to a working-class girl whose home was in one of the few places in the Holy Land that don’t even get a mention in the Old Testament. By many of his contemporaries his parentage would have been considered dubious. At the time of his birth his parents were temporarily homeless, taking shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’, with a manger having to serve as a cradle for the baby.

The first people to be told of his birth were neither wealthy and powerful nor wise and pious. They were neither princes nor priests, neither prophets nor scholars, but farm labourers looking after sheep on a hillside. The first people to bring him gifts were not even his own compatriots but Gentiles who would have been considered to be among the ‘heathen’ by his fellow-countrymen.

Finally, very shortly after his birth, his parents had to flee with him for their lives, to become asylum seekers in a heathen foreign land. Christ’s Nativity and its aftermath is a theme that resonates throughout the history of mankind, today no less than at any time in the past! If part of it is mythical it surely is a magnificent myth, unequalled I believe, in any other culture.

One of the late Sir John Betjeman’s lesser-known poems is Advent 1955. It discusses the way in which we celebrate Christmas, comparing greetings and presents given with those received, and possibly mentally pricing both.

It concludes with the following lines:

The time draws near the birth of Christ,
A present that can not be priced,
Given two thousand years ago.
And if God had not given so,
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the Manger.

The God revealed to us through Christ’s nativity, life, death and resurrection is not ‘a distant stranger’. He is to be seen in the loving mother, the baby in the cot, the workman at his lathe, tending his sheep or, nowadays, bending over his lap-top, the suffering victim on the cross and in the modern ‘interrogation cell’…….and in the risen Christ triumphant over evil and over death.

Iraq – Before and After

It may seem inappropriate, even sacrilegious, to consider those under scrutiny in connection with the Public Enquiry into the War in Iraq at the same time as our celebration of Christ’s incarnation. However our God is one, ‘to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid’ and one of the titles of the Risen Christ is ‘Prince of Peace’.

Possibly to pre-empt the questioning to which he will undoubtedly be subjected at the Public Enquiry in the New Year, Tony Blair who, as Prime Minister, led us into that war, has been talking to national tv about his motivation. This, it appears, was not the threat posed to Britain by Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as we may have imagined, but the need for ‘regime change’. Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and, even had he known that there were no WMDs, our Prime Minister would have found some other justification for invasion!

That, I must say, is very frank. Just think. There was no need for that ‘dodgy dossier’ that was said to establish, beyond a shadow of doubt, the existence of these terrible weapons. There was no need for the ‘leaked intelligence’ that gave rise to scare headlines about ‘our boys in Cyprus’ being in danger from them. All Mr Blair had to do was to persuade the rest of us that getting rid of Saddam would amply justify the certain loss of scores of British and American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi ones, not to mention the laying waste of Iraq’s cities and destruction of its infrastructure.

Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, but was not the only such ruler in the Middle East. In some ways his government was an enlightened one. There was a substantial and influential Christian minority that worshipped regularly and in safety. Where are they and their churches now that Iraq has been ‘freed’? Where are they in the lands of our Middle Eastern allies? Women in Iraq under Saddam enjoyed a freedom and the ability to develop their potential that their counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries would (and often do!) die for.

Whatever Mr Blair may have known and kept to himself, he won that vote for war in the House of Commons for no other reason than that he had persuaded sufficient of its members that Saddam Hussein did possess terrible weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. Without having done that he would have, and should have, lost the vote.

I believe moreover that Messrs Blair and Bush were fairly confident that there were no such weapons. Had they not been, they would surely never have allowed that relatively leisurely build-up of troops, weapons and war supplies just over the Iraq border in Kuwait. Saddam would only have had to wait until the build-up reached a critical point, and then destroyed the lot with his WMDs!

I am more than ever proud of the fact that my sons, grandsons, wives and girlfriends were all part of the million strong march that protested in vain against the war through the streets of London. I only wish that I had been physically capable of joining them!

The Christmas Crib

To get away, if only momentarily, from the rather grubby world of the 21st Century, here’s the Christmas crib at St. James Anglican Church Clacton-on-Sea, taken at Christmas time last year. Similar cribs will appear on Christmas Eve in tens of thousands of Christian churches world-wide, to remind worshippers that Christmas is not about illuminations, Christmas cards, over indulgence in food and drink, or even about Santa Claus. At its heart is the story of a temporarily homeless couple who found shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’ where a young mother gave birth to a baby who was the ‘Light of the World’.

‘And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth’
St. John 1.14

Week 51.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

A Third Millennium Nativity!

I hadn’t been to a live play in a theatre for many years. I was determined though to see CHRISTMAS NOW (a Play for our time) at Clacton’s West Cliff Theatre on 4th and 5th December. Sponsored by 'Churches Together in Clacton', it was proclaimed to be a Nativity Play of the here and now…..its leading characters contemporary young people and something like half its action taking place in Clacton-on-Sea! What’s more, I knew both the producer and the Director. The former was Susan Wiggins, an active member of St. James’s Anglican Church and the latter, Rev. Roger Parsons, the one-time Minister of Trinity Methodist church.

During his time with Trinity Methodist Church Roger Parsons had been responsible for several very successful musical productions there. I recall once referring to him in Tendring Topics (in print) as Clacton’s Rogers and Hammerstein! I was sure that CHRISTMAS NOW, would be a great success, and so it was. It was a truly ecumenical event. I went to the Saturday matinee performance with a small party of Quakers but it was an extra pleasure for me to encounter personal friends from St. James’, from Christ Church URC Church and from Trinity Methodist Church. The theatre was well filled as, so I am informed, it was for the other three performances.

The plot followed that of the original Nativity Story (with a ‘voice from outer space’ – actually that of Fr. Anthony Spooner of St James – reading the appropriate passages from the King James Bible), but Mary was Maria, a waitress in a far-from-posh café in a big city and Joseph an out of work young immigrant, a carpenter of course, finding difficulty in getting a job because he was ‘a foreigner’.

The actual birth took place in a storeroom behind a take-away in Clacton-on-Sea. Maria and Joseph had been lured here with a false promise of a job and accommodation by a crooked property developer (the equivalent of King Herod). ‘The shepherds’ were contract cleaners and ‘the Magi’ three people of different talent from America, Eurasia and Africa. It must be said that the actor who stole the show at the end was a real, live baby (I believe it was a little girl) who, acting the baby Jesus, was wheeled onto the stage in a baby-buggy. I know from personal experience that babies can be pretty unpredictable. This one though might have read the line from Away in a Manger, ‘Little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes’, because she put on a superb performance, smiling, gurgling happily, playing with a ball of wool and, so it appeared, waving to the audience. Could she possibly have managed it for all four performances?

It was a very memorable, enjoyable, and thought-provoking, production.

Afterthoughts

Christmas Now was, as I said, thought provoking. What, I wondered, would really happen if a twenty-first century teenage girl from a church-going working class family experienced an angelic visitation and, immediately after, discovered that she was pregnant? Christmas Now didn’t have an unequivocally ‘happy ending’, but I have an idea that ‘in real life’ the outcome might well have been even more disquieting.

The modern Mary would confide in her parents, who would find it impossible to believe her when she assured them that neither her boyfriend, nor any other man, was responsible. Being practising Christians though, they would promise to stand by her and help her with her expected baby. As loving and concerned parents, they would also insist that she should be seen by a psychiatrist (‘She never has lied to us before. She must surely be delusional’) a gynaecologist and an obstetrician. I can imagine that, after thorough examination and long consultations with both Mary and her parents, these experienced professionals might issue a statement on the following lines:

We have interviewed and thoroughly examined Patient M. (her name cannot be revealed for legal reasons) and we have confirmed that she is, as she has always maintained, a virgin. She cannot therefore possibly be pregnant, as she believes she is. We have come to the conclusion that changes taking place within her uterus are symptomatic of a very rare (though probably not unique) psycho-gynaecological condition producing physical indications of pregnancy. Even more serious is its psychological effect, its victims being subject to convincing delusions and hallucinations. The experience of Patient M clearly demonstrates the power and persistence of these.

Fortunately this patient has presented at a very early stage. We are unanimously of the opinion that a surgical hysterectomy carried out without delay could provide a complete cure and make it possible for Patient M. to live a perfectly normal life. She would not, of course, be able to experience maternity, but that would surely be a small price to pay for being freed from a crippling and probably fatal condition.

This straightforward surgical procedure normally requires patient consent. Patient M. however is just over 18 years of age and resolutely refuses to sign the consent form, insisting that she is pregnant. This refusal is symptomatic of her condition and was to be expected. It might well have been over-ridden were it not for the fact that her parents and boyfriend, who drew our attention to Patient M’s condition in the first instance, are now firmly backing her refusal.

We hope that a positive decision on this issue will be made in time to save Patient M’s life and sanity.

If I were making a modern nativity play out of all the above (which I am quite incapable of doing) I think that I would leave it at that point and let the individual members of the audience go home to think about it and make up their own minds about probable subsequent events.

Would Mary weaken? Would the parents and the boyfriend yield to pressure from the experts? Is it possible that the medical experts would, to quote our Quaker 'Advices and Queries', ‘consider the possibility that they might be mistaken’? or…….. could they possibly not be mistaken, but absolutely right in their assessment of the situation? If the case went to Court what would be the likely outcome?

That would be something to discuss over the sherry and mince pies!

Essex’s Telecare Home Safety Service

When, a few weeks ago, I fell over, broke my glasses and gave myself the blackest of black eyes, I didn’t suffer serious or long lasting injury. My black eye has long since faded. I have new glasses and have abandoned the bifocals that I think may have contributed to my accident. I am now one of those irritating old men who never seem to have ‘the right pair of glasses’ with them!
It did make me think though. I am definitely less steady on my feet than I once was. If I fall, even if I am completely uninjured, I find it impossible to get up again without help. Out of doors there is usually someone available to help. I never (well hardly ever!) go out without my mobile phone for use in an emergency.

Indoors though, a fall could have a very different outcome. If I were uninjured I might be able to crawl to a piece of fixed furniture and laboriously pull myself up, or at least reach a phone to summon help. If I twisted an ankle or broke a limb, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I am fortunate in having caring and attentive neighbours, but it would obviously be hours at least, before they realized anything was amiss.

'Tendring Careline' came to mind. They, as I knew, install a special phone in the homes of their members, who are issued with a pendant alarm button to hang round their necks at all times. Provided that the wearer is within 50 metres, indoors or out, of the phone, pressing the red button raises an immediate alarm at Careline’s HQ. It also activates a loud-speaker system enabling the wearer to communicate with that HQ. It is a tried-and-true system from which hundreds of elderly and/or disabled Tendring residents have benefited.

I was on the point of phoning them when I learned that Essex County Council is currently offering a more comprehensive alarm system that, for me at any rate, seemed to offer positive advantages over the more local one. They have available no less than six ‘telecare’ sensors that cover virtually any possible emergency in the home. These are, I have little doubt, all part of an overall plan to keep us oldies in our own homes for as long as possible, rather than clogging up spaces in a care or nursing home.

There is the Personal Alarm that appears to be much the same as is offered by Tendring Careline. Also available is a ‘Bogus Caller Button’, fitted unobtrusively near the front door, enabling the householder to summon assistance when a dubious stranger requests entry, Smoke Alarms (I already have them fitted), a Flood Detector (never a problem in my part of Clacton), a Movement Detector (a kind of ‘burglar alarm’ that can detect the presence of an intruder and raise the alarm) and a Fall Detector which is said to detect serious falls and alert the monitoring centre.

What makes the County Council’s service of particular interest to me, and to my contemporaries, is that these systems are available on a twelve month free trial to all Essex Residents aged eighty-five and over (those living within the unitary authority areas of Southend and Thurrock are, of course, excluded).


I would, I think, only be interested in the Personal Alarm, though I ought perhaps also to find out a bit more about the Fall Detector. I have already written off asking for further details. ‘A twelve months free trial!’ Goodness, at eighty-eight that’s very likely as long as I shall need it!

Particularly if you are elderly and living alone, or with a disabled husband or wife, and especially if you are eighty-five or over, do make further enquiries. It is a service you have paid for with your Council Tax. Make the most of it. What have you got to lose?

Leaflets about the service are available at Public Libraries. To learn more, write to Essex County Council (Telecare), FREEPOST CL3636, County Hall, Chelmsford, CM1 1XZ or phone 0845 603 7630 (quoting 857) If you are on-line, contact www.essex.gov.uk/telecare I understand that they are prepared to send a speaker if requested, to explain the service to voluntary organisations.

I’ll keep blog readers informed of developments in response to my own enquiry.

Why not support Shopmobility?

Tendring Council is one of fifty local authorities throughout the country that have received a windfall grant of £52,000 ‘to support their high streets and town centres during the recession’.

The Council (or, I suppose, its inner ‘Cabinet’) is considering how best so spend it to create the maximum impact. One scheme they have in mind is for the Council to acquire the leases of boarded-up shops ‘and offer attractive rates to start-up businesses and entrepreneurs to give them a foot on the ladder’. It overlooks the fact that the reason the shops are boarded up is that their previous owners couldn’t attract enough customers to stay in business. Why should ‘start-up businesses and entrepreneurs’ succeed where experienced shop-keepers have failed. In any case, boarded up shops aren’t really very conspicuous in Clacton’s High Street and Town Centre since occupiers have been found for both the Woolworth and the Co-op sites.

I think that by far the best use for that unexpected £52,000 windfall would be to keep Clacton and Tendring Shopmobility afloat. It is a charitable enterprise that has the sole purpose of enabling Tendring residents with mobility problems to visit surviving shops in the High Street and town centre and help to keep them alive. It was for just such a purpose that the money was entrusted to Tendring Council!

Without the cash injection that Shopmobility had every reason to expect from the Council, this vital service, both to town centre shops and to the elderly and disabled, will close down on 31st December and its stock of electric mobility scooters, wheel chairs and so on will all be sold off early in the New Year.

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Christmas is coming!

Christmas is coming……..and as sure as that there will be Carols from Kings and the Queen’s televised Christmas message, there will come a headline-grabbing little lecture calculated to dampen down and spoil the faith and joy of others. Sadly, it is often delivered by a no doubt well-meaning cleric.

This year, it is the Bishop of Croydon (did you know that there was one?) who, it seems, dislikes our traditional Christmas carols. Many of these, he says are the product of Victorian sentimentality and nothing to do with God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. Particularly the subjects of Episcopal displeasure are two of the best known and, I think, most loved of carols; ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘O come, all ye faithful’.

The lines in ‘Away in a manger’ to which the Bishop takes exception are, ‘The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes’. The point is presumably that the Church has always taught that Jesus was wholly human as well as wholly divine and that, as a human baby, he would have woken up crying. Perhaps …. .but if a baby is warm, full of milk and comfortable, and wakes to hear the gentle lowing of cattle, he may well remain silent on waking. Perhaps the Bishop has had an unfortunate experience of parenthood, but human babies really don’t cry all the time.

There are actually two lines of that carol that do make me feel uneasy. ‘I love thee, Lord Jesus look down from the sky, and stay by my side until morning is nigh’. I tell myself though that it is a carol intended for children. It is difficult enough for an adult to understand that Jesus can be ever-present while being outside time and space as we know them. ‘Above the sky’, is however a metaphor easily understood by children.

‘O come all ye faithful’ with its echoes of the Nicene Creed is surely the most magnificent of all the carols, and the one with which every carol service should end. The Bishop says it should be ‘O come all ye faithless’. I think he means that our message should be to those outside the Church. And so it should be, all through the year. Surely though, on the anniversary of the day that ‘the Word was made flesh’, if on no other, the faithful are allowed to be ‘joyful and triumphant’!

There are plenty of other hymns that do have lines that set my teeth on edge. How about ‘sufficient is thine arm alone and our defence is sure’, sung with gusto at an Army Church Parade, 'Take my silver and my gold, not a mite will I withhold’, sung by a comfortably-off middle-class congregation and ‘The vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus his pardon receives'? Surely there must be contrition as well as belief. St. James in his Epistle says ‘the devils also believe – and tremble!’

Lord Bishop, do have a look through the rest of the hymnbook by all means, but please leave our Christmas carols alone!

A Fateful Decision

I was delighted when Barak Obama was elected as President of the US. I hope that it wasn’t simply because he wasn’t George W. Bush. It was obvious though that he was going to have a fight on his hands in a country where any good work carried out by a public authority is liable to be denounced as ‘communism’!

Since his election he hasn’t disappointed, and he has certainly had to fight every inch of the way. He has, for instance, made it clear that (unlike George W. Bush – not to mention our own MP, Mr Douglas Carswell!) Mr Obama does accept the threat from global warming and humankind’s responsibility for this danger. He is, in fact, attending the Conference of World Leaders and leading scientists that opened in Copenhagen this week to discuss climate change and how best to combat it.

He has ordered the dismantling of the rocket sites in central Europe that the Russians regarded as a threat (well, wouldn’t the Americans have regarded Russian, or Chinese rockets sited in Canada or Mexico as something of a threat?). At home he is desperately trying, despite ferocious opposition, to ensure proper health care for the millions of US citizens who simply can’t afford adequate insurance cover.

Is he making another wise decision in deciding to send another 30,000 US troops to Aghanistan, or is it one that he will regret for the rest of his political life? The time that he took to consider this issue suggests that he is well aware of the possibility of disaster. Generals commanding armies stalemated by their enemies are always confident that, if only they had more troops and equipment, they could make one final push and sweep on to victory. They are not always right though!

Supposing the Taleban are defeated and their fighters simply disappear from the scene? No doubt their leaders are well known and may well be captured or killed. There must be hundreds of rank and file though. Most of them could just disappear among the Indian sub-continent's teeming millions and concentrate on terrorist acts there and elsewhere. They could, of course, reappear in Afghanistan when the Brits and Americans decided that they had won and withdrew their troops.

We are desperately trying to transform the Afghan government’s army into a force that can stand up to and defeat the Taleban without our help. Are we absolutely sure that they will want to? We gave covert financial and practical support to the ‘gallant Mojihadin’ in their guerrilla war against the Soviets only to see them transform themselves into ‘fanatical insurgents’, every bit as determined to get rid of us as they were the Russians. The western trained Afghan policeman who turned his weapon against his trainers, and the Muslim medical officer, who in the USA, is accused of suddenly murdering his comrades, could be straws in the wind.

Why are our forces in Afghanistan? Is it to introduce the Afghans to the joys of freedom and democracy; to encourage the education of girls and to ensure justice for women; to encourage religious tolerance? Hardly. It is surely to protect ‘the West’ from terrorist attacks like those in New York, London and Madrid.

I think it likely that the best way to do that might be to withdraw our troops completely from every Muslim country. That is what both extremist and moderate Muslims would like us to do. It would, at a stroke, remove a factor that turns ‘moderates’ into ‘extremists’ and feeds Al Quaida with a constant trickle of enthusiastic recruits. It would release NATO troops for their job of defending the peace of Britain and Mainland Europe.

A Question of Mobility

I have remarked before that although I feel far from comfortable with the zeitgeist of the 21st century, I am more than thankful for the many twenty-first century blessings that help to make life worth living, even in old age. None of my family lives very near and I would have little contact with them were it not for the telephone (particularly perhaps the mobile phone), my laptop and the Internet. And, of course, my sons living in London both have fast cars with which they come to see me regularly. Failing eyesight makes me less inclined to read than I once was (though oddly enough, using my laptop doesn’t seem to tire my eyes!) but radio, television, a video tape recorder and a DVD Player make good the deficiency

I think though, that the modern convenience that makes the biggest difference in my life is my electric mobility scooter, my ‘iron horse’. Luckily I have a shed large enough to house it, to which a kind neighbour has taken an electricity supply so that I am able to keep its batteries charged. I use it almost every day…..for shopping, for going to the Post Office, to Church and to the Quaker Meeting, for keeping doctor’s or optician’s appointments, for visiting friends and, on occasion, for going to the seafront for a breath of fresh air.

As the months pass I find myself less and less able to walk. Were it not for my ‘iron horse’ I would be totally housebound, able to leave home only with a taxi or when someone was able to give me a lift in his or her car. My electric scooter gives me freedom and mobility. It is the possession that I would be least willing to give up.

For all of those reasons I was totally shocked when I read in the Clacton Gazette that lack of funding is compelling Clacton and Tendring Shopmobility, a charity that has served local elderly and disabled local people for over a decade and a half, to close down for good on New Year’s Eve.

Shopmobility, based in Clacton’s Pier Avenue, rents out mobility scooters to those who need them for short periods at cut-price rates. It has provided a first class service to people like myself who are unable to purchase a scooter of their own (they are quite expensive!) or who would have nowhere to store it if they did purchase one. Last year they rented out scooters no less than 4,000 times and their membership almost trebled!

Shopmobility is staffed by volunteers but it does cost £45,000 a year to run. Earlier this year its management applied for lottery funding which would have secured its future for five years, but they were unsuccessful. Nor would Tendring Council help them despite the fact that the charity expects to be in a position to support itself within two years.

Shopmobility’s manager, Julie Hewes-Gardner, says, ‘People are distraught. Many will now be housebound. They won’t be able to get out to the shops and banks, or to socialise’.

I wonder on what Tendring Council is spending our money that is more important than brightening the lives of some of Clacton’s least privileged and most vulnerable residents? It is tempting to denounce them as Scrooges but that is hardly fair on Ebenezer Scrooge. He did, you’ll recall, mend his ways just in time for Christmas. There’s little sign of the Council doing anything of the sort.

Bankers’ Bonuses

Those with brilliant brains at the top of the Banking World will, so they say, desert us and sell their brilliance elsewhere if they do not receive their accustomed astronomical ‘bonuses’ on top of their already more-than-generous salaries.

I think that the instant reaction of most ordinary people is ‘let them go – and good riddance. If they are that brilliant, how is it that we had to bail them out with millions of pounds of our money?’

I think though that the threat raises a more fundamental issue. Most people whose work demands skill and experience, work primarily because they enjoy exercising those qualities. The only skill that I have ever possessed is that of stringing words together to produce the kind of material that I hope others enjoy reading. It was very nice when I was paid for doing so. Nowadays, I am not. My income is however sufficient for my quite-modest needs and I exercise my writing skills, in producing this weekly blog for instance, because doing so gives me satisfaction and pleasure.

Can it be that those whose skill lies in the manipulation of finance, come to believe that this is life’s only reality, and that work has no purpose or meaning beyond the acquisition of more and more money, from whatever source it may come? If so, I feel truly sorry for them. Despite their great wealth they are poverty-stricken indeed!

Week 49.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘These Mechanical Beasts…..these Carbuncles…..these Monsters!’

These are the words of Tendring District Councillor Peter Halliday published on the readers’ letters page of the local Daily Gazette. The object of his wrath is, as you may have guessed, the five wind turbines that are to be built off St. John’s Road, between Clacton and St. Osyth. After a full public local enquiry in which the objectors had every opportunity to state their case Tendring Council’s decision to refuse this development was overturned by the government inspector.

Mr Halliday says that it became clear to him that this would be the outcome of the enquiry, ‘When the Environment Minister told the Labour Party Conference that local Conservative councils refusing such applications would see their decisions overturned by Government Inspectors’. I had realized it well before that. Regular readers of this blog may remember my comment, at the time, on the Council’s decision to refuse the development, against the advice of their own professional planners, for no reason other than that of well-orchestrated very local protests.
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I forecast with confidence that the developers would appeal, that there would be a full and expensive (for us council-tax payers) public enquiry, and that the Council’s refusal would be overturned. But there, I have probably had a rather longer experience of local government and of public enquiries than has Councillor Halliday.

The sole objection to the development was, as far as I know, the one plastered on all the objectors’ posters and banners ‘Too near to Homes!’ The Council’s Planning Officers, who were on the spot, and the Government’s inspector who visited the site, clearly thought otherwise.

There was no possible risk of physical danger from the turbines. Almost a mile away from homes, they would surely be inaudible. Unlike the hideous electricity pylons that stride across the English countryside, there has never been any suggestion that living in their proximity can endanger either child or adult health.

The sole objection was their appearance. They would obviously affect the view. The same objection could be made though wherever wind turbines are provided in a rural or semi-rural area ……..and if the turbines were to be sited anywhere but in such an area then they might truly be ‘too near to homes’.

Needless to say our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, like Mr Halliday, is outraged by the inspector’s decision. He, together with two or three correspondents to the local press, is convinced that no climatic change is taking place or, if it is taking place, that it’s a natural phenomenon and nothing to do with human activity. It must be very comforting to watch on tv the human misery created by horrific floods in Cumbria, for the second time in just a few years and worse than anything ever experienced in the past, and to be able to say, ‘Ah well, very sad……but of course it’s an “Act of God”, nothing whatsoever to do with us and our activities!’

Iraq

The long-awaited public enquiry into the events preceding the war in Iraq, the conduct of that war, and its aftermath has only been hearing witnesses for two or three days. Already though, it has become clear that the reasons for our joining the USA in invading Iraq were far different from those we were told at the time.

The invasion took place in the aftermath of ‘nine eleven’ and it was claimed that Iraq was a sponsor of the kind of international terrorism that was responsible for that event. This claim, it has been revealed, was held by the United States’ Government but was never really believed in Britain.

‘Nine eleven’ had its genesis within the frontiers of Afghanistan and of ‘the west’s’ allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, rather than in either Iraq or Iran.

Then we were told that the Iraqi government possessed cunningly concealed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that posed a threat to the whole of the Middle East and to ourselves. The United Nations’ Weapons Inspectors had found no evidence of these before the allied invasion and none have been found since. It has now been revealed that there had never been any really convincing evidence that they existed.

It seems that the real motive of the Anglo-American Alliance had always been ‘regime change’ rather than either retribution for ‘nine eleven’ or the eradication of unspeakably terrible weaponry. Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator whom ‘the west’ had failed to topple after the Kuwait War. This was the time to make a thorough job of it. It now seems that, even if this very dubious excuse for war were considered to be valid, conflict could still have been avoided. Our former Ambassador to the USA has told the enquiry that pressure on Iraq was prompting rebellion and that, very shortly, the regime would have collapsed from internal pressure. Tens of thousands of lives may have been destroyed for want of a little patience!

That same former ambassador also told the enquiry about the friendly meeting between our Prime Minister and the American President at the latter’s ranch in Texas. The two of them had a cosy chat from which everyone else was excluded. No one knows what was discussed or what agreements may have been reached. It had been noticeable though that from that moment the Prime Minister’s attitude towards Iraq hardened. He began to talk both about possible war and about regime change. He was singing from the George W. Bush hymn-sheet!

I have been surprised by the amount of deception and chicanery that has been openly revealed in just the first few days of the enquiry. Whatever, I wonder, can possibly be in the evidence that – the press tells us – the Prime Minister has insisted must be revealed to the enquiry only in secret!

Crisis at the Top

Can it, I wonder, possibly be true that Tendring Council’s top three officials (each of them said to be enjoying a salary of over £100,000 a year) are facing redundancy and that councillors are thinking of replacing them with a new, lower budget ‘management board’?

If so it is interesting to speculate on the deliberations that preceded that decision. It must surely have been made by a group of influential councillors meeting in what would once have been described as ‘a small smoke-filled room’. Contrary to popular belief it is quite possible to sack a top official. I have a fairly recent memory of a Clerk of the Council (the less-well-paid equivalent of a Chief Executive prior to local government reorganisation in 1974) of the former Clacton UDC resigning his post after having been strongly encouraged to do so. To make the three at the top redundant does seem a little unusual.

The difference between local government in my day (admittedly over thirty years ago!) and life at the town hall today, was brought home to me by the composition of the triumvirate that comprises a management board of Tendring Council’s top, and most highly paid, officials. They are the Chief Executive, the Deputy Chief Executive and the Assistant Chief Executive, each of them I have no doubt, an expert in cost-effective ‘administration’ and ‘the management of human resources’.

In ‘the bad old days’, The Town Clerk, or Clerk of the Council, was ‘the first among equals’ of a number of Council Chief Officers, each of whom managed his or her own department and reported regularly to a Committee concerned with that department’s sphere of work. There would be the Council’s Treasurer, the Engineer and Surveyor and the Medical Officer of Health. Larger authorities might have an independent Housing Manager and the Chief Sanitary Inspector (later Chief Public Health Inspector) would sometimes be regarded as a separate Chief Officer.

The idea that there should be a Deputy and an Assistant Town Clerk who outranked, and were on a higher salary scale, than those professional heads of departments, would have been received with incredulity and derision, as would the suggestion that there should be a Chief Officers’ ‘Management Board’. It is true that, after the reorganisation of 1974 there was a ‘management team’, consisting of heads of departments, who met regularly to discuss common interests. Heads of departments though made their own reports and recommendations to their committees and the committees discussed them and made their recommendations to the whole council.

The present system of ‘professional managers’, exercising authority over professional doctors, accountants, architects and surveyors, appears to be part of a package that included the abolition of the committee system and its replacement by one aping party political government in Westminster. We now have a powerful officers’ ‘management board’ making recommendations to ‘Portfolio holders’ (local cabinet ministers!) who make decisions that would previously have been the responsibility of committees. At intervals the full Council meets and members of the majority party are expected to support loyally policies decided by that small ‘Cabinet’ of portfolio holders.

It is a system that may make for greater speed and efficiency (though I haven’t seen much evidence of this in Tendring) but it is a negation of representative local democracy.

Some Modern Art

I am not a great enthusiast for all-things-modern. It has sometimes seemed to me that there is a late twentieth century/early twenty-first century enthusiasm for ugliness…..in art, in architecture, in music and in poetry. Not all my family are so unenlightened. My younger son Andy and his wife Marilyn are enthusiastic Friends of the National Gallery. They share my liking for much of the art of the past, but also appreciate the work of contemporary artists. Possibly in an attempt to educate me in the finer things of life, they have recently sent me photos of an example of the work of Anish Kapoor CBE, Royal Academician, whose work has been acclaimed and exhibited world-wide.

Above - Sculpture by Anish Kapoor displayed outide National Gallery.

Left - Detail from above

Well, it certainly isn’t ugly. It’s new and refreshing. It’s beautiful in fact. But still (put it down to my advanced age) it’s not really my cup of tea!

Week 48.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Apologies all round!

I am sure that the Australian Government was right to apologise to all those who, as children, had been transported from Britain in the middle of the last century with the promise of a ‘new life down-under’. They were to discover that all their links with home had been severed and that for many of them, the promised new life would be one of exploitation and drudgery. It was surely a shameful episode in Australia’s history – as there have been shameful episodes in the history of all nations.

I am not quite so happy about the forecast that our Prime Minister would also apologise for the same episode ‘sometime in the New Year’. The essence of a sincere apology is that it should be spontaneous and made as soon after the offence as possible. I don’t think either that our guilt is in quite the same category as that of the Australians. It was shameful that the children were cut off from all contact with friends and relatives, in some instances being wrongly informed that their parents had died. Our government should too have followed up the fate of the transported children. That surely would have been a useful task for the ‘Intelligence Services’ to undertake!

I think it likely that most, if not all, of those in Britain who organised the transports really did believe that these children were being given the chance of a better life. Had those ‘disadvantaged children’ remained in England their lives might well not have been materially different from that in Australia. If you have watched the first episode of Andrew Marr’s 'Making of Modern Britain' you’ll know that, for the poor, life in Edwardian Britain was by no means a bowl of cherries!

I can testify that it wasn’t in the 1930s either. At 49 my father, a Territorial Army Permanent Staff Instructor was made redundant (though in those days it was just called ‘getting the sack’) in 1931 when the TA was downsized, rationalised or whatever it was then called. His former commanding officer found him a very poorly paid job with his veterinary practice. That, with the small pension that he received for his 21 years service (non-commissioned of course) in ‘the Regulars’, kept our heads just above the poverty line. The ‘20s and ‘30s, when most of those exiled children were growing up, were years of mass unemployment, of the hunger marches, the Means Test…..and the rise of political extremism.

There had been other, very successful migrations to ‘the colonies’. In the early 1900s an uncle and an aunt of mine, both then teenagers, had emigrated quite separately from Britain to Canada ‘for a new life’. Had they remained in England, the destiny for my uncle would have been that of farm labourer and for my aunt domestic service. In the event they certainly prospered better in the New World than their siblings did in England. My uncle, after serving in the Canadian Army in World War I, became a prosperous farmer. My aunt had a happy marriage and was a comfortably off widow at the end of her life.

The 21st Century seems to have become an age of apology. The Archbishop of Canterbury has, quite absurdly in my opinion, apologised for the Church’s initial reaction to Darwinism. The Australian government has apologised to the Aborigines. Our government has apologised for the slave trade. Yes, of course it was shameful and appalling – but, while they are at it, shouldn’t they also be apologising to Britain’s working people for the appalling working and living conditions they endured during the industrial revolution in this country. Freedom is always to be preferred to slavery, but I have no doubt that at least some African slaves in the New World, were better housed and fed than many ‘free’ British factory labourers. The slave-owner had a vested interest in keeping ‘his property’, alive and fit enough to work. The British factory owner could always tell his wage slaves: ‘There are plenty more where you came from’.

That was when Thomas Hood had put into the mouth of his overworked and underpaid seamstress in ‘The Song of the Shirt’.

Oh, to be a slave, along with the barbarous Turk,
(Where a woman has never a soul to save)
If this be Christian work!

It is in any case impossible to judge those who lived in the 19th or early 20th century by the standards of the 21st. They did lots of things and had lots of attitudes that we today find profoundly shocking. Believe me, they would be at least equally shocked and disgusted by attitudes and actions that we consider acceptable or even admirable today. My own formative years were in the mid-twentieth century so I don’t have to read that in history books. I know!

Nor do I think that there is anything very meaningful in apologising for the actions of ones predecessors. To say that you profoundly regret what they did is one thing. To make an apology is another. That implies an admission of guilt, something that only those who are guilty need feel. Politicians in particular, should limit their apologising to their own errors and misjudgements. Most of them would find that that gave them plenty of scope for contrition, without their having to worry about the sins of past generations

Out of Sight……….Out of mind.

Bradwell’s now-closed nuclear power station is not actually quite out of our sight. From the sea front in Jaywick or St. Osyth its unlovely buildings can be seen in the distance across the wide Colne estuary. It cost millions of pounds to build and it leaves behind a poisonous residue that will take millennia to decompose. Its useful life though spanned only a few decades. I well remember its being built and, of course, we all remember its being closed down – an event at which many of us breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Now though, it seems likely that another nuclear power station will be built on the site, which is one of thirty-one that the government considers to be suitable for that purpose.

I have no doubt at all that additional and alternative sources of energy are urgently needed if we are to halt the inexorable progress of climate change, and to cope with the demands of industry and our ever-growing population. I don’t believe though that nuclear energy is the only or best alternative and, even if it were, that Bradwell would be a suitable site for a nuclear power station.

Nuclear energy production is vastly expensive, highly dangerous and leaves a residue that remains lethal for millennia. No one has yet discovered any way of detoxifying it or even of storing it safely. Wherever in the world and however deeply you may bury it, it is impossible to find a spot where you can say with certainty that the buried materials won’t be disturbed by natural disaster or the folly of humankind during the next – say 2,000 years.

Why is Bradwell a particularly unsuitable site? Apart from accidents due to human error (remember Windscale, remember Chernobyl!) the biggest threats to nuclear power stations come from terrorists and from natural flooding. Rising sea levels and the extreme weather conditions that can be expected as a result of climatic change increase the risk of flooding. As was demonstrated in 1953 the flat Essex coastal plain (nowhere many feet above sea level) is particularly at risk from flooding from the sea.

The Essex coast with its inlets from the sea, and many sparsely populated coastal areas could also be particularly vulnerable to a well-funded, well-planned and resolute terrorist attack launched from an apparently harmless private yacht or fishing vessel moored off-shore. How good would the defences of a nuclear power station at Bradwell be against a suicidal and well-armed landing party? The ease with which determined anti-nuclear campaigners have managed to gain access to such power stations for propaganda purposes, suggests to me that they would be unlikely to be adequate.

The government has indicated that the planning processes may be streamlined to ensure the rapid approval of the new proposed power stations. That means that our right to protest will be limited. Bradwell is, as the crow flies or the nuclear fallout cloud drifts, just a few miles to the windward of Clacton. I hope therefore that our protests will be at least as well orchestrated and well publicised as those made recently about the proposed provision of a few perfectly harmless on-shore wind turbines!

Our MP

Our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, certainly has a knack for getting himself into the news. When the MPs expenses scandal first broke he was a leader of the pack demanding the resignation of the speaker. His image as a latter-day St. George was slightly dimmed by the, mostly good-humoured, amusement that was evoked by the revelation that his own expenses had included a ‘love seat’ settee for his second home.

Last week in this blog I commented on his independent spirit in going it alone, against majority political and scientific opinion, in declaring his conviction that concern about mankind’s role in the climatic change that is painfully obviously going on all around us, is ‘all hot air’.

This week a letter from a Dave Bolton of Park Road, Clacton, in the Clacton and Frinton Gazette reveals that on 5th November Mr Carswell broadcast on the BBC World Service his intention of campaigning for a referendum on the UK remaining part of the European Union, despite David Cameron' assurance that such a referendum would be pointless.

He argued that the former referendum was now invalid because those ‘over 52 years of age’ (either he, Mr Bolton, or the Gazette subeditor, must have got that wrong; he surely meant under 52) had not had a chance to choose through the ballot box. Mr Bolton points out that neither had those under 52 seen the devastation caused by a European war, the prevention of which was one of the purposes of the formation of the Union. It has certainly achieved that. War between members of the EU is now surely quite unimaginable.

Mr Carswell might have also pointed out that many of those who voted in that now-distant referendum may well have changed their minds since then. I certainly have. I voted NO to what was then the EEC on that occasion, but would most certainly vote YES to membership (preferably of a more closely integrated EU) in any future referendum.

Global Warming is just hot air, the slightly tarnished sword of righteousness against self-seeking MPs, a new referendum on EU-membership……! I wonder if Mr Carswell has ever considered the possibility that he might be a member of the wrong political party? Careerwise, this could be a good time to switch. I have just heard on BBC evening news that UKIP is looking for a dynamic new leader.

Two Postscripts

Last week in this blog I expressed my contempt for the Sun newspaper’s blatant exploitation of the grief and anger that had prompted Mrs Janes, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, to complain about her name being wrongly spelt in a letter of condolence sent her by the Prime Minister. My younger son tells me that, on its website, the Sun also spelt her name wrongly in exactly the same way as the Prime Minister! The Sun celebrated its fortieth birthday last week. I suppose we may hope that one day it will grow up.

My suggestion that there should be a White Poppy Day, on which white poppies (sold in aid of civilian victims of war) might be worn world-wide on an internationally agreed date of remembrance and repentance for the civilian victims of war in every time and place, also provoked comment. I was reminded that white poppies, sold by the Peace Pledge Union, are already worn by many people on and around Remembrance Sunday as a sign of their commitment to peace.

The commitment to world peace of my wife and myself was, I think, no less than theirs. For several years we each wore a white poppy as well as a red one under the impression that the proceeds from their sale went to some charity supporting wounded civilians. They don’t. They go to the Peace Pledge Union, a worthy cause and one that I support in other ways. On Remembrance Day though, I want to remember my fallen comrades. I don’t like its use (as has happened in the past!) for recruitment to the armed forces – but I don’t like its use for peace propaganda either!

Week 47.09

Tendring Topics……..on line

In Defence of the Government!

I’m by no means a blind supporter of the government. However, I’m not a blind and unthinking opponent either. I think that during the past week or two, the government, and the Prime Minister in particular, have twice been subject to quite unjustifiable criticism.

First, there was ex-chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, who resigned in a well-publicised huff when his advice wasn’t followed to the letter. Cannabis, he insisted, was less dangerous than either tobacco or alcohol and its use, if not exactly encouraged, should be regarded tolerantly. If either tobacco or alcohol were newly invented I have little doubt that they would be treated as dangerous drugs…..but they’re not. Alcohol has been with us from the beginning of time. I am told that there is no human society so primitive as to have failed to find a way of producing it!

Tobacco has been in use in Europe since it was brought back from America in the 16th Century. It is only relatively recently that we have realized quite how dangerous it is. Since then successive governments have done their very best, short of actually banning it, to discourage its use.

The function of a scientific adviser is to advise. It is the elected politicians who have to make the decisions and they are, quite rightly, guided by other considerations than purely scientific ones. Politics, it has been said, is the art of the possible. A columnist in the East Anglian Daily Times recently wrote that he had three friends ‘with adult sons with schizophrenia after teenage kicks with cannabis. One has been in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years, another is periodically sectioned (once after having set fire to the family home) and the third lives with his parents on a strict regime of medication’. Try telling those parents that cannabis is less dangerous than this that or the other substance that is freely available!

The other occasion has been the vilification that Gordon Brown has received because of a couple of human errors in a letter of condolence to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. I was amazed and rather touched to learn that the Prime Minister sends individual hand-written letters to the next-of-kin of such victims of the war. Did Tony Blair? Did Margaret Thatcher?

The mother in question was a Mrs Janes. I’d be very surprised if this lady’s name isn’t fairly frequently misspelled, either because it has been misheard or, with typed correspondence, because the ‘m’ key has been tapped by accident instead of the ‘n’. As for the letter having a hand-written correction – I’d have taken that as evidence that it was actually hand-written by the Prime Minister, and not some clever facsimile produced by the wonders of modern technology!

I certainly wouldn’t criticise Mrs Janes for complaining. Had I been in her position I’d have been so full of grief and anger that I’d have raged at anyone who had the misfortune to cross my path. What was beneath contempt was the Sun’s exploitation of Mrs Janes’ grief and anger for its own miserable propaganda purposes!

A Correspondent in Mexico

Many regular readers of this blog will already know that I have a Flickr site www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea on which there are over 300 of my photographs, many family pictures but others of general and historical interest. This has brought me some interesting correspondents, including two Canadian distant cousins whom I hadn’t known existed, and a fundamentalist and ‘far-right’ Baptist truck-driver from America’s ‘deep south’ with whom I have had interesting (if inconclusive!) theological and political discussions.

The latest, and among the most interesting, of my email correspondents has been a lady from Mexico City, seeking permission to use one of my Flickr photos. She is Giulianna Laurent and is obviously deeply involved with the museum of Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City. This is what she wrote:

‘Memoria y Tolerancia (Memory and Tolerance) is a non-profit organisation with the mission to promote tolerance through the historical remembrance of genocides (Holocaust, Armenia, Guatemala, Former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur).

From its inception, Memoria y Tolerancia projected a museum and educational center in Mexico City, keeping in mind that the best tools for the creation of awareness are learning and education.

I am working in the Yugoslavia permanent exhibition of the museum and I saw a picture of Bosnia posted on your page that we’ll like to expose.

The picture is the following:
http//www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea/418109226/

I want to ask your permission to use the picture only inside the museum. If you agree please let me know. Thanks, Giulianna Laurent, Memoria y Tolerancia A.C.

Below is the picture that Giulianna wanted to use:

It is of the old Turkish pack-horse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, and was taken during Heather’s and my visit there with our motor-caravan in 1980. It was the year of Marshal Tito’s death and Yugoslavia was still one country, to all appearances a happily multi-ethnic and multifaith one. When we took the picture, young Bosnians were demonstrating their machismo by diving from the apex of the bridge into the fast-flowing water of the river below!

Within a year or two of our visit the bridge had been destroyed by artillery bombardment during Yugoslavia’s bloody civil war. The Serbs are usually depicted as the villains in that conflict, but the destruction of the bridge, and the violent deaths of hundreds of men, women and children in the Mostar area was the result of conflict between Croats and Muslims (Serbs and/or Croats whose ancestors had converted to Islam during the many years of Turkish occupation).

The museum of Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City is furthering a cause that I would wish to support. I willingly gave permission for the picture to be used in any way that Giulianna wished, and told her that I would like to hear more about the museum’s progress. In expressing her thanks she attached a photo of it. Here it is. It is certainly impressive!

In a further email I drew her attention to this blog-spot. I felt that last week’s blog, in which I suggested a world-wide ‘White Poppy Day’ in which the millions of civilian victims of conflict could be remembered, and funds raised for the support of survivors, might be of interest to her and her colleagues

It’s not what you say…..it’s the way that you say it,

That’s what causes offence. This thought, hardly a new one, came back to me with extra force recently.

Have you been watching Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain? In the first episode, dealing with the Edwardian age and Edwardian moral values, Andrew Marr recounted the occasion on which Marie Lloyd, a very popular Music Hall performer, was questioned by MPs about the bawdiness and explicit sexual content of some of the songs for which she was well-known.

Marie Lloyd gave a little demonstration. With a straight face and the demeanour of a vicar’s daughter singing at an evening gathering of her father’s parishioners, she sang to the committee a couple of her most popular songs full of outrageous double entendre. Not an eyebrow was raised.

She then sang ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, a romantic poem by eminent Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson that had been set to music. It was a song with which members of the committee would all have been familiar. They may well have heard their own daughters or wives sing it to their guests after dinner. Marie Lloyd though, sang it with winks, gestures and knowing smiles that had the worthy MPs writhing with embarrassment. It’s not what she sang but the way that she sang it!

It made me think of once-harmless words that are now banned because they might possibly cause offence. Newcomers to Essex Police, for instance, have recently been advised that they should never use ‘black’ in a negative context such as ‘black mark’, ‘black sheep’, ‘blacken’ someone’s character, for instance, though ‘blackboard’ and ‘black and white’ referring to newsprint, are OK.

I would ask the (I feel fairly confident) white people who make these rules if they take offence when a government report is said to be a ‘whitewash’, when someone is described as ‘showing the white flag’ or of being ‘white with fear’, or indeed with the Biblical reference to hypocrites as 'whited sepulcres' If not, isn’t it patronising and insulting, racist even, to assume that someone with a skin colour different from their own must necessarily be more ready to take offence?

What the world of 2009 badly needs is courtesy (it used to be called ‘common politeness’) in our dealings with one another, whatever may be our skin colour. Political correctness is a very, very poor substitute.

A well-deserved honour

I was very pleased to learn that Clacton’s seafront gardens and west greensward have been awarded the Green Flag of excellence by the Keep Britain Tidy organisation. The gardens had been demonstrated to be welcoming, healthy, safe, secure and well-managed. It took me back to the days when Tendring had its own direct labour gardening department that regularly displayed, and won the top prizes, at county and district agricultural and horticultural shows.
Clacton-on-Sea's clifftop Memorial Garden

Late News – from Mexico City!

As I was about to post this blog I received a further email from my new friend in Mexico City who is deeply involved with the nearing-completion Museum of Memoria y Tolerancia there. Here is what she writes:

Hello Ernest,

I have read your blog and your proposal about the white poppy. I think it is a great idea and it will make an awareness in all civilian people about the innocence of the victims. Through which organisation do you propose that the money will be given to civilian victims??

The museum includes a part called ‘Tolerance’ where we invite the visitor to question the value of tolerance and diversity. I think it will be a good idea to promote your white poppy project there. I will let you know when the museum opens, it will be around June 2010 to see what we can do.

Kind regards,

Giulianna

I have to confess that I hadn’t even thought of the distribution of the proceeds. I suppose probably the Red Cross/Red Crescent. Then there is Christian Aid – if they could get together with equivalent organisations of other world faiths.

Week 46.09

Tendring Topics………on Line

Why not a White Poppy Day for the Civilian Dead?

Last Sunday we especially remembered the servicemen and women slain in World Wars I and II and in subsequent and continuing conflicts.

In World War II at least, and probably in other more recent conflicts, the number of civilian dead greatly outnumbered the casualties in the armed forces. We have, it is true, a day (27th January) on which the victims of the Nazi Holocaust are remembered, another on 11th September for the victims of ‘nine-eleven’, and yet another (6th August) on which many remember those who were vaporised when the first very nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima. Although we worry desperately about ‘rogue nations’ or terrorists gaining control of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, it is worth remembering that the only countries that have so far actually used such weapons are Britain and America!

The Soviet Poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s best-known poem Babiy Yar, about the ravine near Kiev where a notorious massacre of Ukrainian Jews took place during the German occupation, begins, ‘Over Babiy Yar there are no memorials’.

Much the same could be said about the civilian dead of Coventry, of London’s East End, and of other British cities during the Blitz, not forgetting the tens of thousands killed in British and American air raids on Berlin, Hamburg and (quite inexcusably in my opinion) on Dresden at a time when the end of the war in Europe was clearly in sight? And, of course, the estimated one million civilians who lost their lives during the German siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and the comparable loss of life in Warsaw, Stalingrad (now Volgagrad) and other towns and villages throughout Poland, Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine? Nor must we forget the many thousands of civilians who have died and are still dying as a result of conflicts in Africa.

I believe that there is a strong case for an International Day of Remembrance of the Civilian Dead in every country and in every conflict. Almost every country in the world has at least some civilian war dead to remember and mourn, and there are very few countries that have no responsibility for the civilian dead of others.

It could be a day to remember the victims of Dresden and Hamburg, as well as those of Coventry, Warsaw and Leningrad; of Lebanon and Gaza as well as of the Holocaust; of Serbs in Bosnia under Croatia’s puppet Fascist regime during World War II, as well as of Muslims during the more recent conflict; of the civilian victims of Japan in mainland Asia during World War II as well as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and of course, the victims of ‘nine-eleven’ and of terror bombings throughout the world.

For almost all of us it could be a day of national repentance as well as of mourning. It could also be a day on which we all wore an appropriate emblem (perhaps a white poppy) as a symbol of our determination never, ever, to let it happen again. These emblems could be sold worldwide to help the all-too-many civilian victims of national, tribal or sectarian violence in the world today.

‘Global Warming is just hot air’, claims our MP

Nobody could possibly accuse our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, of allowing himself to be swept along with the tide of public opinion, or even of following blindly the leadership of his own political party.

Like me, he has a blog on the internet and doesn’t hesitate to use it to promote currently unpopular causes about which he feels strongly. A subject on which we both have strong views is global warming. The difference between us is that I am convinced that global warming is a rapidly accelerating threat to humankind and that our own human activities are hastening it. In this I am for once with the overwhelming majority of informed political and scientific opinion. Mr Carswell, on the other hand, is gallantly swimming against the tide in declaring, ‘I have thought long and hard about it and in my view, the climate is not changing because of human activity’.

What a pity Mr Carswell didn’t announce this revelation in time to stop the world’s leaders and most of their leading scientists journeying to Copenhagen to discuss what our MP knows to be ‘just hot air’.

Mr Carswell believes too that this ‘dangerous obsession with climate change’ is costing us money. It has, he says, already led to an increase of 25 percent in our electricity bills and this is expected to rise to 60 percent in five years time. Funny that, because my combined gas and electricity direct debit payments have recently been almost halved, partly as a result of my heeding warnings of climate change and having had solar water-heating panels installed on my roof.

Solar Panels being installed on the roof of my bungalow earlier this year. I do try to practise what I preach!

Even if it could be proved conclusively that no global warming is taking place, or that, if it is taking place, it is not as a result of human activity, there would still be an energy crisis. We would still have an urgent need to end our dependence on fossil fuels, to conserve all the energy that we can, and to find and develop more and more renewable sources of energy.

Fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, were all created millions of years ago from the luxuriant vegetation of long-prehistoric periods in the world’s history. There developed vast reservoirs of all these materials below the earth’s surface. Vast, but not infinitely vast! Nor are they renewable. As a result of the accelerating industrialisation that has taken place worldwide over the past century and a half, reserves of coal, oil and natural gas are rapidly diminishing. As they diminish market forces decree that they become ever more expensive. Future generations will not have the easy option of fossil fuel to warm their homes, light their streets and power their factories!

Not even Mr Carswell and the Australian geologist Ian Plimer, who shares his view that climatic change is not taking place as a result of human activity, can possibly imagine that the depletion of the world’s natural resources (coal, oil and gas) has been caused other than by energy-hungry humanity

North Sea Gas is already running out. The USA, whose reserves of oil were once considered to be almost inexhaustible, is now an importer. What’s more, the oil supplies on which we heavily depend come from the notoriously volatile and unstable Middle East, and our gas supply from Siberia. Is Mr Carswell happy that his (I am sure very comfortable) first and second homes depend for their warmth, lighting and power on oil from Saudi Arabia or the Persian Gulf, and gas from Russia. The Russians, recent converts to capitalism, have learned quickly how to use market forces to their own advantage. And why not? All’s fair in the global market place. Those who need a commodity in short supply must expect to pay its price to those who, for the moment at least, have it in abundance.

So if, as Mr Carswell believes, talk of man-made global warming is just ‘hot air’ humanity’s predicament is no less serious. We still need those wind turbines, solar panels, tidal and wave energy generators and, indeed, any other source of renewable sustainable energy that we can discover and develop, together with every means of recycling and conserving energy that we can find. That is, of course, if we have a vision that extends beyond the next Public Opinion Poll or the next General Election.

REAL Christmas Stamps

How refreshing to find that this year the Post Office has rediscovered the fact that Christmas is a Christian Festival and has given us (well, perhaps ‘given’ isn’t quite the right word) unmistakeably Christian Christmas Postage Stamps.

Last year, you may remember, customers at Post Offices who simply asked for Christmas Stamps were handed somewhat garish stamps with Pantomime Characters printed on them. I remember that the one used for correspondence with mainland Europe had a picture of Captain Hook. It occurred to me that in a thousand Continental homes, recipients of mail from England will have been asking, ‘Why on earth have the mad English put a one-armed pirate on their Christmas stamps this year?’

There were a limited number of ‘religious’ Christmas stamps available, if you specially asked for them. The first and second-class stamps both bore different, and very attractive, pictures of the Virgin and Child. I bought quite a lot of both and have used them throughout the year as an unobtrusive affirmation of Christian Faith. I think that I may have just one or two left.

This year things are very different. Those charming 1st and 2nd class Virgin and Child stamps are again available if you want them. The ‘ordinary’ Christmas stamps though are reproductions of detail from the stained glass windows of a village church in Norfolk.

1st Class is another picture of the Virgin and Child, 2nd Class is a pre-Raphaelitish angel with a medieval mandolin (or is it a harp?) accompanying an angelic choir) and the 56p (European) one, depicts an elderly haloed man – possibly St. Joseph looking down at the Christ-child in the manger?

No doubt similar stamps are available in other denominations but those are the ones in which I was interested, and I didn’t feel justified in holding up the Post Office queue while I viewed the others! The 1st Class stamp could certainly be used as an afirmation of faith on all personal mail throughout the year.

This year’s stamps will clearly please all Christians. Will those of other faiths or none resent them? I don’t see why they should. There will, I am sure, be plenty of stamps and books of stamps bearing the usual ‘Queen’s head’ picture. No one who doesn’t wish to do so need use an overtly ‘Christian’ stamp.

Week 45.09

Tendring Topics………on line

Remembrance Sunday

Next Sunday (8th November) is Remembrance Sunday. It is, I think, a commemoration that towards the end of the last century was beginning to lose significance as the World Wars and their victims began to fade from contemporary memory and to take their place in the history books.

Born as I was in 1921, I can remember during my childhood the continuing desolation of the bereaved of World War I; the grieving mothers, the young widows, the attractive girls destined to become old maids because the love of their life was buried ‘in some corner of a foreign field’. Throughout my pre-teen years there were always women, in tears, wearing their Flanders poppies on black garments at Remembrance Services on what we then called ‘Armistice Day’. At tens of thousands of such services it was affirmed that, ‘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 will remember them’.

But those who remembered them best wished so fervently that they had had the opportunity to grow old; the opportunity to be wearied by age and to endure (and enjoy!) those inexorably passing years.

I doubt if since 1945 there has ever been a single day in which the whole world has been at peace. At least though, we in Western Europe have been at peace with each other, and, for the most part, only marginally affected by conflicts raging elsewhere in the world. The ‘Cold War’ remained mercifully cold.

Then came the Falklands War and, after a relatively short gap, the first and second Gulf Wars, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Once again we have parents, proud of their dead hero sons and bravely keeping a stiff upper lip, weeping widows and orphans, and desolated girl friends……. not, of course, anything like as many as there were in the wake of the two world wars, but their grief is every bit as painful and as profound.

It will almost certainly be in the prayerful silence of our Quaker Meeting for Worship that on Remembrance Day I shall remember my fallen comrades from World War II. In my Territorial Medium Artillery Regiment (6in howitzers for those interested in such things) we were mostly in our late teens and early twenties, young men from Ipswich and other East Suffolk towns and villages, who had volunteered for the TA at the beginning of 1939 when we had had realized that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable.

From 1939 till July 1941 we were part of Britain’s defences against invasion. In 1941 we sailed to North Africa and, during the winter of 1941/1942 we helped to secure the surrender of Bardia and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) from the combined German and Italian Forces. When Rommel counter-attacked in the New Year we were for several months in almost continuous action in the Gazala Line, west of Tobruk. Eventually we became part of the Tobruk Garrison and were overrun by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21st June 1942.

There were 100 fatal casualties among the 700 or so men in my regiment.. That was a quite a heavy death-toll for a Medium Artillery regiment serving in North Africa in World War II. What I find particularly appalling is that, while there were obviously some deaths in battle, the overwhelming number occurred after Tobruk had fallen and we had been taken prisoner.

There were deaths when a diphtheria epidemic raged through the large transit POW camp in Benghazi, Libya. There were deaths in Italian prison camps from starvation-related afflictions. I watched Jock McGregor, a Scotsman and a good friend of mine, simply take to his bunk and die of hunger and cold in a camp in northern Italy. A few lost the will to live after receiving ‘Dear John’ letters telling them that their girlfriends or wives had found new ‘true loves’. ‘Who is he?’ ‘I don’t know; some smooth s….. in a reserved occupation or b……. overpaid Yank I suppose’.

In Germany there were deaths on the long trek in the icy conditions of northern Europe during the winter of 1944/1945 as POW camps in Poland and East Prussia were evacuated to avoid prisoners being liberated by the advancing Red Army. By far the greatest number of fatal casualties from my regiment were though from ‘friendly fire’. Fifty young men whom I had known personally, drowned like rats in a trap on 14th November 1942, when a British submarine torpedoed the Italian SS Scillin, the prison ship transporting them from Tripoli to Italy. The commander of the submarine had thought that he was attacking an Italian troop ship.

Myself on my return to England from captivity in Germany and below Heather Gilbert, the girl who had waited for me for four years.

I received no battle injuries, escaped the epidemic in Benghazi, sailed earlier and uneventfully from Libya to Italy, and survived semi-starvation in Italy. On VE Day I liberated myself from German captivity (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Red Army!) and arrived home in Ipswich, safe and sound, just ten days later on 18th May, my 24th birthday! My girlfriend Heather Gilbert was waiting for me, having successfully resisted the attractions of both our American allies and those in reserved occupations during the four years that I had been overseas.

I was, as I have so often been, extremely lucky. On Sunday I shall remember with sadness the tragically wasted lives of friends and comrades who didn’t enjoy that same good luck.

Flanders’ Poppies

This morning (26th October) I heard a ‘what the papers say’ report on the radio that a letter in the Daily Telegraph, from a Lieut. Col. (retired) complained bitterly about tv news announcers wearing their poppies prematurely. ‘Poppies’, the good Colonel insisted, ‘should be worn only after 1st November’.

Who on earth says so? That sounds to me like one of those stupid Regimental Orders that used to appear on our Battery Notice Board insisting that ‘From 0800 hrs. 1st October, great coats will be worn on parade’, never mind the fact that 1st October might well be in the middle of an Indian Summer heat wave.

With Christmas catalogues in the post before the end of August, and Easter eggs and hot cross buns on sale the minute the Christmas decorations come down, it’s sad if we can’t wear our Flanders Poppies a week or so early!

In any case tv news announcers are not alone in having never heard of (or of ignoring) this prohibition.. No politician hoping to be returned to Westminster in next year’s General Election has been seen without a poppy for almost a week. Lots of ordinary people in the street, myself among them, are wearing them too.

I think that everybody who wishes the Poppy campaign well, should be very pleased that this year the poppies were on sale in good time and that people were already wearing them well before the end of October.

Pride cometh before a fall!

So says the proverb, and mine certainly did. On Saturday 24th October, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, came to Clacton to visit me. After lunch at the Bowling Green we wondered what to do next. It was a damp and miserable day. ‘Let’s try the Martello Tower at Jaywick’, I suggested, ‘often there’s an art exhibition there’.

That Saturday was ‘between Exhibitions’ but Andy and Marilyn thought they’d like to see the view from the top. They looked at me doubtfully, ‘Anywhere you two can go, I can go too’, I said with eighty-eight year old pride, ‘I can climb those two flights of stairs. No problem!’

And so I could, holding on firmly to the hand-rail and pulling myself up. Andy and Marilyn followed behind, ready to try to break my fall if I had been over-optimistic. I reached the top safely. Here there was no hand-rail. I took two steps forward, lost my balance, and fell heavily on my front. Pride had indeed come before a fall!

No, I didn’t suffer any permanent injury. I broke the frame of my glasses and scratched the left lens (over my one ‘good’ eye!). The frame dug into my face and caused cuts that, at the time, bled profusely. I think though that my glasses probably saved my eye from more serious injury. Andy and Marilyn found some tissues to staunch my bleed and Andy dialled 999 for a paramedic to check me over. I made my way slowly and carefully to the ground floor (on the way up I had quoted Sir Thomas More’s piece of black humour as he mounted the scaffold to have his head cut off: ‘Would you be kind enough to help me up please. I’ll make my own way down!)

On the ground floor there was a comfortable settee on which I sat and waited for the Paramedic. He arrived in a very few minutes, applied plaster dressings to my ‘wounds’, told me that I had a lovely black eye developing and urged me to phone my doctor if during the next 24 hours I experienced sickness, faintness, serious headaches or dizziness. I had none of those symptoms and have been left with nothing worse than a still-lingering black eye and the need (that will soon be met) for a new pair of glasses.

I’m not surprised though that ‘Pride’ is listed as one of the seven deadly sins though, in my case, I am glad to be able to say that it proved to be a good deal less than ‘deadly!’

Tony Blair for EU President ………I think not!

Speaking as a Europhile (by fairly recent convincement!) and firm believer in closer European integration, I think that Tony Blair is the very last person who should be considered for the Presidency of the European Union. For one thing he would represent a country that is only a half-hearted member.

Even if our European partners were prepared to accept a British President, Tony Blair would be among the last names that would come to my mind. I think that, with his ever-ready smile and persuasive tongue, he would probably use his presidency to try to create a New-EU on the lines of New Labour, an organisation for which I feel minimal enthusiasm..

I have little doubt that his appointment would be welcomed by the CIA and by the Far Right in the USA who, judging him by past perfomance, would see him as ‘Our man in Brussels’. I can only hope that if by some mischance Tony Blair were elected President, he would prove them to be wrong.