Tendring Topics……..on Line
A Snake to the Rescue?
Interest in alternative sources of energy began long before anybody thought seriously about global warming. The great smog of 1952/1953 gave us a salutary warning about the perils of ‘dirty fuels’. Smoke from tens of thousands of coal fires and furnaces belching from domestic and industrial chimneys in the London area, combined with unusual (but not unique) atmospheric conditions, to produce smog that enveloped the capital from December till March. It has been estimated that it caused or hastened the deaths of at least 10,000 people.
At that time my young wife Heather, heavily pregnant with our first son, had only one lung fully operational. The other had been surgically permanently collapsed to eradicate tuberculosis. Our home was in rural Suffolk. Just a few years earlier we had been living in furnished rooms in South London, barely half a mile from the then-fully-operational Battersea Power Station. Had we still been there it is likely that she and our unborn son would have been among the smog’s victims.
‘Broomside, The Crescent, Barham, near Ipswich, our first real home, where we lived from 1948 till 1955 and where our elder son Peter was born in 1953.
The Clean Air Act helped to solve that particular problem. Heating oil, another popular fuel, came principally from the unstable Middle East. Both it, and natural gas, were finite sources and would be used up eventually, perhaps within decades. It was only very gradually that the danger of global warming became apparent…..at first as a distant danger, taken seriously only by a few ‘cranks and scaremongers’. Today practically everybody recognises it as an imminent global catastrophe.
Some thought that nuclear energy would solve all our problems. The Windscale and Chernobyl disasters demonstrated its potential dangers, and even the very safest nuclear plant produces wastes that remain lethal not just for decades or centuries, but for millennia!
I am glad that wind and solar power are being increasingly exploited. Visiting Clacton’s seafront early in May it was good to note that three or four of the turbines of our off-shore wind farm have been completed. I look forward to many more windfarms, both offshore and on-shore. But the wind doesn’t always blow. Nor, as my recently installed solar panels will testify, does the sun always shine!
However, the ocean is never completely still and it is necessary only to stand on Clacton beach to appreciate the potential power of the waves. I have long felt that it is in harnessing their power, and that of the tides, that our salvation may come. Several means of doing this have been attempted but none have been wholly satisfactory.
An experimental system recently demonstrated on the BBC tv Breakfast programme seemed to me to have tremendous promise. Called ‘The Anaconda’ after the giant snake of that name, it consists of a number of rubber tubes 200 metres or more long and 7 metres in diameter. Filled with water these would be anchored, end-on to the direction of the waves, beneath the surface of the sea. Electricity would be created from the constantly moving undulation of ‘the snake’ and would be transmitted to the shore.
Clacton Pier (note the new helter-skelter!) and the sea on a calm day. Wave movement would be sufficient to generate electricity.
This surely has the simplicity of genius. If it can be made to work, what a tremendous energy advantage it would give Britain, where, so I once read, nowhere is more than fifty miles from salt water!
It could, so they said, be up and running within five years. A pity…. as Monday of this week (18th May) was my 88th birthday is it is highly unlikely that I shall ever see it in operation!
Keeping the Blue Flag flying high!
Until a few years ago, if we had a succession of warm and sunny summer days, I would cycle from my home in Clacton’s Dudley Road down to the Martello Beach (where Butlins Holiday Camp used to be) for a refreshing swim. There was a wide expanse of gently shelving sandy beach and no hidden snags or dangerous currents in the sea. I was very pleased in 2006 when the beach received the recognition that I felt it had long deserved, with the award of the prestigious European Blue Flag.
Very shortly afterwards it lost it; not because of any factor over which Tendring District Council had control but because the bacterial quality of the sea water failed to reach the very high standard required. I suspect that this was due to some shortcoming in the fairly recently completed Jaywick Sewage Treatment Plant, the responsibility of the Anglian Water Authority, possibly coupled with exceptionally heavy rainfall affecting water quality.
My cycling and swimming days are over I fear. Nevertheless I am delighted to learn that the Blue Flag has been restored. This year (a year in which we are hoping for more holiday visitors from other parts of Britain and from overseas) this international symbol of excellence will again be flying over the Martello beach.
It will also be flying, as it did last year, over beaches in Brightlingsea and Dovercourt Bay.
Quality Coast awards, which go to beaches not quite reaching the high standard demanded for the Blue Flag have been awarded to Clacton’s West Beach, Frinton Beach, Harwich Beach and Walton’s Albion and Naze Beaches.
Those Frinton residents who live ‘on the right side of the tracks’ have recently been rendered apoplectic by the replacement of their traditional level crossing gates by automatic remotely controlled barriers. One Connaught Avenue Estate Agent complained that he would no longer be able to describe desirable properties in Frinton’s leafy avenues as being ‘within the gates’. (How refreshing to encounter an estate agent with such a devotion to the exact truth!).
I think that if I were one of those Frintonians I’d be rather more concerned about the fact that the town’s wide expanses of tide-washed golden sand are officially considered to be inferior to those of common old Clacton, Brightlingsea and Dovercourt Bay!
Campervan Ban
The ban on campervans parking overnight on Clacton’s sea front recently attracted the interest of the national news media. Images on BBC tv’s Look East of parked vans and their occupants on Marine Parade brought back to me vivid images of my motor caravanning days. During the 1980s and early ‘90s my wife Heather and I spent many happy holidays with our Toyota Van, touring widely in mainland Europe as well as England’s south coast and west country.
We would never, under any circumstances, have parked overnight on any public highway. This was not out of consideration for local residents but simply because we enjoyed peace and tranquillity on our holidays. We wouldn’t have appreciated having to listen during the night to passing traffic and late-night revellers.
In fact, when holidaying in England we usually sought out well-appointed official camping sites (we were members of both the Camping Club and the Caravan Club). Sometimes though it could be difficult to find one suitable for just one or two nights’ stay in the area we wished to visit. In most mainland European countries there was no shortage of official camping sites……but there were also many more unpopulated areas in the wild where the touring camper or caravanner could make an unofficial overnight stay without encountering any problems. I have very happy memories of brief stays on a beach, just yards from the Adriatic, in pre-Civil War Yugoslavia, in a glade in Germany’s Black Forest and in an abandoned stone quarry in the Italian Alps.
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Summer 1980 – Heather, with our motor-caravan in the shade of an olive tree just a few yards from the Adriatic shoreline in then-peaceful Yugoslavia
Nowadays I suppose, even if such ‘wild sites’ could be found in largely urbanised and overcrowded England, touring campers would hesitate to use them for fear of being the victims of assault and robbery during the night. A quarter of a century ago neither in England nor on the Continent, did we give that possibility a moment’s thought. Has human nature and regard for law and order really changed so radically in the past twenty-five years?
A Snake to the Rescue?
Interest in alternative sources of energy began long before anybody thought seriously about global warming. The great smog of 1952/1953 gave us a salutary warning about the perils of ‘dirty fuels’. Smoke from tens of thousands of coal fires and furnaces belching from domestic and industrial chimneys in the London area, combined with unusual (but not unique) atmospheric conditions, to produce smog that enveloped the capital from December till March. It has been estimated that it caused or hastened the deaths of at least 10,000 people.
At that time my young wife Heather, heavily pregnant with our first son, had only one lung fully operational. The other had been surgically permanently collapsed to eradicate tuberculosis. Our home was in rural Suffolk. Just a few years earlier we had been living in furnished rooms in South London, barely half a mile from the then-fully-operational Battersea Power Station. Had we still been there it is likely that she and our unborn son would have been among the smog’s victims.
‘Broomside, The Crescent, Barham, near Ipswich, our first real home, where we lived from 1948 till 1955 and where our elder son Peter was born in 1953.
The Clean Air Act helped to solve that particular problem. Heating oil, another popular fuel, came principally from the unstable Middle East. Both it, and natural gas, were finite sources and would be used up eventually, perhaps within decades. It was only very gradually that the danger of global warming became apparent…..at first as a distant danger, taken seriously only by a few ‘cranks and scaremongers’. Today practically everybody recognises it as an imminent global catastrophe.
Some thought that nuclear energy would solve all our problems. The Windscale and Chernobyl disasters demonstrated its potential dangers, and even the very safest nuclear plant produces wastes that remain lethal not just for decades or centuries, but for millennia!
I am glad that wind and solar power are being increasingly exploited. Visiting Clacton’s seafront early in May it was good to note that three or four of the turbines of our off-shore wind farm have been completed. I look forward to many more windfarms, both offshore and on-shore. But the wind doesn’t always blow. Nor, as my recently installed solar panels will testify, does the sun always shine!
However, the ocean is never completely still and it is necessary only to stand on Clacton beach to appreciate the potential power of the waves. I have long felt that it is in harnessing their power, and that of the tides, that our salvation may come. Several means of doing this have been attempted but none have been wholly satisfactory.
An experimental system recently demonstrated on the BBC tv Breakfast programme seemed to me to have tremendous promise. Called ‘The Anaconda’ after the giant snake of that name, it consists of a number of rubber tubes 200 metres or more long and 7 metres in diameter. Filled with water these would be anchored, end-on to the direction of the waves, beneath the surface of the sea. Electricity would be created from the constantly moving undulation of ‘the snake’ and would be transmitted to the shore.
Clacton Pier (note the new helter-skelter!) and the sea on a calm day. Wave movement would be sufficient to generate electricity.
This surely has the simplicity of genius. If it can be made to work, what a tremendous energy advantage it would give Britain, where, so I once read, nowhere is more than fifty miles from salt water!
It could, so they said, be up and running within five years. A pity…. as Monday of this week (18th May) was my 88th birthday is it is highly unlikely that I shall ever see it in operation!
Keeping the Blue Flag flying high!
Until a few years ago, if we had a succession of warm and sunny summer days, I would cycle from my home in Clacton’s Dudley Road down to the Martello Beach (where Butlins Holiday Camp used to be) for a refreshing swim. There was a wide expanse of gently shelving sandy beach and no hidden snags or dangerous currents in the sea. I was very pleased in 2006 when the beach received the recognition that I felt it had long deserved, with the award of the prestigious European Blue Flag.
Very shortly afterwards it lost it; not because of any factor over which Tendring District Council had control but because the bacterial quality of the sea water failed to reach the very high standard required. I suspect that this was due to some shortcoming in the fairly recently completed Jaywick Sewage Treatment Plant, the responsibility of the Anglian Water Authority, possibly coupled with exceptionally heavy rainfall affecting water quality.
My cycling and swimming days are over I fear. Nevertheless I am delighted to learn that the Blue Flag has been restored. This year (a year in which we are hoping for more holiday visitors from other parts of Britain and from overseas) this international symbol of excellence will again be flying over the Martello beach.
It will also be flying, as it did last year, over beaches in Brightlingsea and Dovercourt Bay.
Quality Coast awards, which go to beaches not quite reaching the high standard demanded for the Blue Flag have been awarded to Clacton’s West Beach, Frinton Beach, Harwich Beach and Walton’s Albion and Naze Beaches.
Those Frinton residents who live ‘on the right side of the tracks’ have recently been rendered apoplectic by the replacement of their traditional level crossing gates by automatic remotely controlled barriers. One Connaught Avenue Estate Agent complained that he would no longer be able to describe desirable properties in Frinton’s leafy avenues as being ‘within the gates’. (How refreshing to encounter an estate agent with such a devotion to the exact truth!).
I think that if I were one of those Frintonians I’d be rather more concerned about the fact that the town’s wide expanses of tide-washed golden sand are officially considered to be inferior to those of common old Clacton, Brightlingsea and Dovercourt Bay!
Campervan Ban
The ban on campervans parking overnight on Clacton’s sea front recently attracted the interest of the national news media. Images on BBC tv’s Look East of parked vans and their occupants on Marine Parade brought back to me vivid images of my motor caravanning days. During the 1980s and early ‘90s my wife Heather and I spent many happy holidays with our Toyota Van, touring widely in mainland Europe as well as England’s south coast and west country.
We would never, under any circumstances, have parked overnight on any public highway. This was not out of consideration for local residents but simply because we enjoyed peace and tranquillity on our holidays. We wouldn’t have appreciated having to listen during the night to passing traffic and late-night revellers.
In fact, when holidaying in England we usually sought out well-appointed official camping sites (we were members of both the Camping Club and the Caravan Club). Sometimes though it could be difficult to find one suitable for just one or two nights’ stay in the area we wished to visit. In most mainland European countries there was no shortage of official camping sites……but there were also many more unpopulated areas in the wild where the touring camper or caravanner could make an unofficial overnight stay without encountering any problems. I have very happy memories of brief stays on a beach, just yards from the Adriatic, in pre-Civil War Yugoslavia, in a glade in Germany’s Black Forest and in an abandoned stone quarry in the Italian Alps.
Summer 1980 – Heather, with our motor-caravan in the shade of an olive tree just a few yards from the Adriatic shoreline in then-peaceful Yugoslavia
Nowadays I suppose, even if such ‘wild sites’ could be found in largely urbanised and overcrowded England, touring campers would hesitate to use them for fear of being the victims of assault and robbery during the night. A quarter of a century ago neither in England nor on the Continent, did we give that possibility a moment’s thought. Has human nature and regard for law and order really changed so radically in the past twenty-five years?
A Family Event
Unusual circumstances recently resulted in my being able to see grandsons Chris (living and working in Taiwan), and Nick (living and working in Brussels), and their girl-friends within a week of each other. Chris and Ariel flew to England on the sad mission of seeing and bidding farewell to the family pet dog Zoe. She is a well-loved twelve-year-old Boxer whose life is probably drawing to a close.
However it did mean that, with son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, they were able to pay a flying visit to Clacton. It was a joy for me to see them again.
.
Here I am demonstrating ‘how it works’
Ariel, who could speak virtually no English when I first met her nearly a year ago, is now a fairly confident speaker. She was, as you can see, fascinated by my ‘iron horse’ and took it for a brief canter!
How did I happen to see Nick again? I’ll tell you about that in next week’s blog!
Unusual circumstances recently resulted in my being able to see grandsons Chris (living and working in Taiwan), and Nick (living and working in Brussels), and their girl-friends within a week of each other. Chris and Ariel flew to England on the sad mission of seeing and bidding farewell to the family pet dog Zoe. She is a well-loved twelve-year-old Boxer whose life is probably drawing to a close.
However it did mean that, with son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, they were able to pay a flying visit to Clacton. It was a joy for me to see them again.
.
Here I am demonstrating ‘how it works’
Ariel, who could speak virtually no English when I first met her nearly a year ago, is now a fairly confident speaker. She was, as you can see, fascinated by my ‘iron horse’ and took it for a brief canter!
How did I happen to see Nick again? I’ll tell you about that in next week’s blog!
Here is Ariel taking off for a brief trip along Clacton's Dudley Road.
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