Tendring Topics……..on Line
An Expensive Fence…..for an Expensive Fountain!
Those of us who had thought that Clacton’s town centre water feature would eventually prove to have been worthwhile had a nasty shock when it was revealed that it would be operating again this summer but with a £20,000 fence round it to keep the children out! During the very occasional warm and sunny days that we have had during which the feature was operating, the children have loved running through it and many of us adults have enjoyed watching them enjoying themselves!
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I think that that water feature would make this area even more attractive.
It seems though that the children whose ‘health and safety’ is supposed to be threatened by the less-then-sterile water in the fountain are also claimed to be a major cause of its alleged pollution. Other polluting agents are said to be seagulls, pigeons and stray dogs. There’s not much that can be done about seagulls and pigeons, though I don’t think that either are very keen on being drenched. All dogs in a town centre should, in their own interest, be on a lead and under their owners’ control. Strays should be, and I think probably are, impounded.
What is there about our water feature that is so different from apparently identical ones in the centre of Sheffield and in many other British towns? Could it be that their councils had the foresight to provide them with adequate filtration and purification equipment or are they simply less obsessed with ‘health and safety’?
Sheffield’s water feature outside the Town Hall. Don’t tell me that kids never plunge through those fountains in the summer!
Has anyone thought that perhaps the sea should be fenced off in the interest of health and safety? That, after all is subject to pollution every summer from thousands of children and adults, not to mention from seagulls and fish!
Even in ‘sunny Clacton’ there are only a limited number of weeks during the year when the weather is sufficiently warm to tempt children or anyone else to plunge through that town centre water feature. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to drain off and change the water, say once a week or once a fortnight, during that period? A dilute bactericide added to the replacement water would surely keep it adequately free from harmful bacteria until the next change was due.
We’d get quite a few changes of water for that £20,000.
A Party Political Leaflet
Above is a leaflet from a prospective County Council election candidate for my part of Clacton. I hope that included in the ‘best education’ that he hopes our children will receive will be the time-honoured rule, ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’.
On the Pier
When my elder grandson Chris brought his Taiwanese girlfriend on a visit to England last year, one of the ‘thoroughly English’ things that she wanted to see was a seaside pier. Clacton Pier in early autumn, on a grey and rainy day with a brisk on-shore breeze was, I thought, thoroughly uninviting. She enjoyed herself though and, with Chris, sampled the dodgems and other rides that were in operation.
Ariel (her English name, the same as that of ‘the good fairy’ in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’) with me on Clacton Pier
The Pier is in new ownership and if she were to pay us a visit now I think that she would find it a lot more exciting. Just a week ago the new owners (Billy and Elliot Ball) installed a 500 ft. tall helter-skelter (formerly used in a Marks and Spencer advert) which can be seen from far away along the promenade. There hasn’t been one on the pier for at least twenty years and my abiding memory of a former helter-skelter is of it having been blown into the sea during a ferocious gale in July 1956!
Messrs Ball are introducing a new policy of having a changing programme of ‘guest rides’ which will give visitors something new to try out every time they come onto the pier. Currently there is a fifty-two-seater ‘wave swinger’ situated on the very edge of the pier and swinging users out over the sea. That sounds ‘white-knuckle’ enough for me but, according to Billy Ball, it is nothing compared with one that he is currently trying to book as its successor. It is proving very popular though and is expected to stay on the pier until well into May.
The new owners have also, so far, brought in some more fairground stalls and some smaller rides for children. They are also keeping the pier open later in the evenings.
I wish Billy and Elliot Ball every success but I think that their constantly changing programme of rides may be less popular with children than with their parents. The young can be very conservative. A child who has been looking forward for a week or more to another go on a ride that he has thoroughly enjoyed, is unlikely to be very pleased to find that it has been replaced by something else!
Letting ‘the train take the strain’!
It astonishes me how often I write something that I think on reflection was probably something of an exaggeration; only too find that it was, in fact, an understatement!
Coming back from London a few days ago on an uncrowded train that had departed from Liverpool Street dead on time and promised to arrive equally punctually at Clacton Station, I wondered if perhaps I had been guilty of hyperbole in referring in this blog a few weeks earlier to ‘Britain’s abysmal public transport system’.
My feeling of guilt disappeared completely when I read a letter from Tony Baxter of the Outrack Rail Users’ Association in a recent Clacton Gazette. I quote:
Buses will replace trains between Clacton, Walton and Colchester over the weekends of April 18 - 19th, April 25 – 26th and May 2nd – 4th. Furthermore on the first two of these weekends there will be no train services south of Colchester and buses will operate from Colchester to Billericay for train connections.
Over the May Day weekend, the line will be closed between Ilford and Liverpool Street, and buses will operate between Ingatestone and Liverpool Street and between Romford and Newbury Park Underground (on the Central Line).
Please note that further weekend engineering work is planned for subsequent weekends.
Mr Baxter’s letter also tells of even more closures of the whole section of line between Walton and Thorpe-le-Soken from 18th April until 4th May inclusive, with trains being replaced by buses.
Just imagine (or perhaps you’d be wiser not to!) the congestion on the roads leading to and from London that will be created on those spring weekends, as passengers who have paid for a rail journey have to travel by bus. The inevitable discomforts and delays will be particularly bitter for us pensioners who, under other circumstances, could have made those journeys free with our bus passes.
It makes those tv adverts about the delights of a day spent in London, courtesy of National Express ring a little hollow. Perhaps we should add ‘Don’t make a fuss, there’s always a bus’, to that advertising slogan about letting the train take the strain!
An Expensive Fence…..for an Expensive Fountain!
Those of us who had thought that Clacton’s town centre water feature would eventually prove to have been worthwhile had a nasty shock when it was revealed that it would be operating again this summer but with a £20,000 fence round it to keep the children out! During the very occasional warm and sunny days that we have had during which the feature was operating, the children have loved running through it and many of us adults have enjoyed watching them enjoying themselves!
.jpg)
I think that that water feature would make this area even more attractive.
It seems though that the children whose ‘health and safety’ is supposed to be threatened by the less-then-sterile water in the fountain are also claimed to be a major cause of its alleged pollution. Other polluting agents are said to be seagulls, pigeons and stray dogs. There’s not much that can be done about seagulls and pigeons, though I don’t think that either are very keen on being drenched. All dogs in a town centre should, in their own interest, be on a lead and under their owners’ control. Strays should be, and I think probably are, impounded.
What is there about our water feature that is so different from apparently identical ones in the centre of Sheffield and in many other British towns? Could it be that their councils had the foresight to provide them with adequate filtration and purification equipment or are they simply less obsessed with ‘health and safety’?
Sheffield’s water feature outside the Town Hall. Don’t tell me that kids never plunge through those fountains in the summer!Has anyone thought that perhaps the sea should be fenced off in the interest of health and safety? That, after all is subject to pollution every summer from thousands of children and adults, not to mention from seagulls and fish!
Even in ‘sunny Clacton’ there are only a limited number of weeks during the year when the weather is sufficiently warm to tempt children or anyone else to plunge through that town centre water feature. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to drain off and change the water, say once a week or once a fortnight, during that period? A dilute bactericide added to the replacement water would surely keep it adequately free from harmful bacteria until the next change was due.
We’d get quite a few changes of water for that £20,000.
A Party Political Leaflet
Above is a leaflet from a prospective County Council election candidate for my part of Clacton. I hope that included in the ‘best education’ that he hopes our children will receive will be the time-honoured rule, ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’.
On the Pier
When my elder grandson Chris brought his Taiwanese girlfriend on a visit to England last year, one of the ‘thoroughly English’ things that she wanted to see was a seaside pier. Clacton Pier in early autumn, on a grey and rainy day with a brisk on-shore breeze was, I thought, thoroughly uninviting. She enjoyed herself though and, with Chris, sampled the dodgems and other rides that were in operation.
Ariel (her English name, the same as that of ‘the good fairy’ in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’) with me on Clacton Pier
The Pier is in new ownership and if she were to pay us a visit now I think that she would find it a lot more exciting. Just a week ago the new owners (Billy and Elliot Ball) installed a 500 ft. tall helter-skelter (formerly used in a Marks and Spencer advert) which can be seen from far away along the promenade. There hasn’t been one on the pier for at least twenty years and my abiding memory of a former helter-skelter is of it having been blown into the sea during a ferocious gale in July 1956!
Messrs Ball are introducing a new policy of having a changing programme of ‘guest rides’ which will give visitors something new to try out every time they come onto the pier. Currently there is a fifty-two-seater ‘wave swinger’ situated on the very edge of the pier and swinging users out over the sea. That sounds ‘white-knuckle’ enough for me but, according to Billy Ball, it is nothing compared with one that he is currently trying to book as its successor. It is proving very popular though and is expected to stay on the pier until well into May.
The new owners have also, so far, brought in some more fairground stalls and some smaller rides for children. They are also keeping the pier open later in the evenings.
I wish Billy and Elliot Ball every success but I think that their constantly changing programme of rides may be less popular with children than with their parents. The young can be very conservative. A child who has been looking forward for a week or more to another go on a ride that he has thoroughly enjoyed, is unlikely to be very pleased to find that it has been replaced by something else!
Letting ‘the train take the strain’!
It astonishes me how often I write something that I think on reflection was probably something of an exaggeration; only too find that it was, in fact, an understatement!
Coming back from London a few days ago on an uncrowded train that had departed from Liverpool Street dead on time and promised to arrive equally punctually at Clacton Station, I wondered if perhaps I had been guilty of hyperbole in referring in this blog a few weeks earlier to ‘Britain’s abysmal public transport system’.
My feeling of guilt disappeared completely when I read a letter from Tony Baxter of the Outrack Rail Users’ Association in a recent Clacton Gazette. I quote:
Buses will replace trains between Clacton, Walton and Colchester over the weekends of April 18 - 19th, April 25 – 26th and May 2nd – 4th. Furthermore on the first two of these weekends there will be no train services south of Colchester and buses will operate from Colchester to Billericay for train connections.
Over the May Day weekend, the line will be closed between Ilford and Liverpool Street, and buses will operate between Ingatestone and Liverpool Street and between Romford and Newbury Park Underground (on the Central Line).
Please note that further weekend engineering work is planned for subsequent weekends.
Mr Baxter’s letter also tells of even more closures of the whole section of line between Walton and Thorpe-le-Soken from 18th April until 4th May inclusive, with trains being replaced by buses.
Just imagine (or perhaps you’d be wiser not to!) the congestion on the roads leading to and from London that will be created on those spring weekends, as passengers who have paid for a rail journey have to travel by bus. The inevitable discomforts and delays will be particularly bitter for us pensioners who, under other circumstances, could have made those journeys free with our bus passes.
It makes those tv adverts about the delights of a day spent in London, courtesy of National Express ring a little hollow. Perhaps we should add ‘Don’t make a fuss, there’s always a bus’, to that advertising slogan about letting the train take the strain!
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