The Covers are off!
The plastic covers and the scaffolding that for months have masked the façade of the converted building in Jackson Road that is to become Clacton’s Travelodge Hotel have been removed. We can now see what the hotel will look like from the outside. No doubt internal work has been simultaneously carried out and, as promised, Clacton’s latest hotel will be open and ready for business by the end of July, less than a fortnight from the posting of this blog.
The new Travelodge Hotel, opposite the ‘Clacton Gazette’ office in Clacton’s Jackson Road is nearing completion.
Everyone knows that it is what happens in August, during the school holidays, that really determines whether or not our holiday trade has a good season. The augurs are promising. While the weather has so far been a bit mixed, we have certainly already had more warm and sunny days than we had in either 2007 or 2008. We have had rain and thunderstorms but, as usual, rather less than practically anywhere else. Even when the skies have been cloudy, it has usually been warm.
Visitor numbers during those three successive spring public holidays suggest that many may be on the way, and that we may have more than the usual number of overseas visitors taking advantage of the weakness of the pound. Despite all the criticism in the correspondence columns of the Clacton Gazette, I believe that most visitors will be attracted by our town’s newly laid-out centre and will be encouraged to come again. I have been telling my German friends (who live nearly 700 miles from their nearest seaside beach!) about the Essex holiday coast’s low rainfall, welcoming piers, colourful public gardens, and miles of tide-washed sandy beaches, not to mention the proximity of historic Colchester and the lovely Stour Valley; just as I tell my English friends about the mountains and lakes, the hotels and pubs, the ancient towns and villages and the low prices, of the three-country-corner land where the frontiers (which happily no longer exist!) of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic come together.
‘Some corner of a foreign field…….’
Nowadays, the bodies of soldiers killed in action are brought home for burial and thus do not become, as claimed in Rupert Brooke’s poem 'The Soldier', ‘some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England’. Plenty of British blood has watered Afghan furrows though, from our two disastrous adventures there in the 19th century. It has, no doubt, mingled with the Russian blood that was shed there just a few short years before our own latest campaign began.
I am writing these words on Tuesday 14th July, the day that eight bodies were flown home together, after one of the worst weeks for the British army since the Falklands War. I sometimes wonder how many British and American, not to mention Russian and Afghan, lives might have been spared had our politicians refrained from encouraging and giving covert support to those to whom we then referred as ‘the gallant Mojihadin’ but who are now the fanatical insurgents exacting a bloody daily toll from among our young soldiers. It is quite possible that British or American agents taught them how to make those simple roadside bombs currently causing so much death and destruction.
Can the present war be won? Top British and American politicians insist that it must be – but then I have little doubt that British politicians said much the same thing in 1850 and 1882, and that the same claim was made in Moscow just a few years ago. Events proved otherwise then and I very much fear that they will do the same this time….after even more lives have been lost.
I have no doubt that NATO Forces (what on earth has Afghanistan to do with the North Atlantic?) can subdue the Taliban and its allies, possibly even succeeding in eliminating all their strongholds and hiding places. But ideas (even thoroughly bad ones!) can’t be destroyed by force. I don’t believe that we can establish an Afghan government with either the inclination or the strength to eliminate in Afghanistan the pernicious doctrines of the Taliban – opposition to democracy and to freedom of speech and religion; opposition to girls receiving any education beyond religious instruction, and relegation of women to the status of personal property; slavish adherence to the most intolerant and restrictive interpretation of the Islamic Faith – the equivalent of that of the Christian iconoclasts, witch-hunters and heretic-burners of past centuries.
Opinion polls suggest that almost half of British people feel that we should pull our forces out of Afghanistan. My own instinctive feeling is the same, but I realize that that too could have disastrous consequences. After the Soviet withdrawal (‘Afghanistan is free again!’, our newspapers and politicians proclaimed) there was a not-widely-publicised bloodbath in Kabul and other Afghan cities. Those who had co-operated with the Soviet-approved regime were hunted down and slaughtered and Afghan women and girls (who had enjoyed more freedom under the Soviets than they had ever before known!) were again reduced to the status of chattels and house slaves.
Does anyone imagine that the situation would be any different if we were to withdraw our troops? Red, and Red-White-and-Blue flags look remarkably similar to Taliban zealots. They believe that both are flown by Godless infidels intent on attacking their religion and destroying their centuries old customs and culture. The conviction that God is on their side can inspire men and women to great heights of heroism – but it can also license deeds of almost unbelievable cruelty and inhumanity.
We cannot with clear consciences withdraw our forces from Afghanistan before we have found a way protecting, or evacuating, those Afghans who have embraced the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government towards which we have urged them.
We ‘ignorant pensioners’?
Is the ‘Tendring Pensioner’ destined to replace the ‘Essex girl’ as an iconic symbol of human ignorance? It seems that the Tendring District is an area of ‘low educational achievement’ with 22 percent (about 9,500 people) having no qualifications, compared with a mere 12.5 percent across the East of England.
It’s OK though. It isn’t the up-and-coming young and middle-aged who’re ignorant. The survey has been ‘skewed’ by the large number of over-65s living in the district and, of course, they didn’t have the educational advantages that the young enjoy today! The Clacton Gazette tries, in its understanding-the-elderly way, to be helpful. ‘It is never too late for learning’ announces its ‘Comment’ column. It assures us that, ‘for those that do commit to learning later in life, they are much the richer for it and education is one of the few things in the world which, if it were universally available and availed of, can be seen as a panacea for most of the ills that infect us at home or abroad. If, at eighty-eight, I wanted to express such patronising rubbish I would certainly manage to do so rather more succinctly and literately than that!
Doesn’t it occur to whoever conducted the survey, and to those who pontificate in the columns of the press, that lack of ‘paper qualifications’ could simply mean that education authorities of fifty, sixty or (in my case) over seventy years ago didn’t distribute these qualifications quite as freely as they do today?
+1930s.jpg)
A class of nine-year old boys at Springfield Council School, Kitchener Road, Ipswich in 1930. I am the anxious looking little boy with glasses sitting just by the knee of the Headmaster (A Mr Offord , ‘old Pip Offord’ to us kids – behind his back, of course). I was admitted to the Northgate Grammar School a year later.
In the 1930s I was one of a minority who attended a secondary school and stayed on at school until I was sixteen. The vast majority of my contemporaries received only a primary (we called it an elementary) education and left school at 14. For them there was no ‘school leaving certificate’ but that did not mean that they were totally ignorant. Very few boys and girls in those days left school at 14 unable to read, write and do as much arithmetic as they were likely to need in later life. They also had a sketchy idea of Britain’s history and of the geography of the world, and at least some acquaintance with English classical poetry and prose including, of course, the Bible. Today’s sixteen-year-old school leavers who knew as much would certainly get some kind of a certificate.
At my secondary school we studied for the London University ‘General Schools Certificate’ which, for those who obtained high enough marks, conferred exemption from the Matriculation (minimum entrance requirement) of London University. For that reason the exam was often known simply as ‘the Matric’. To obtain the certificate we had to study and reach the pass standard in at least five subjects including English (language and literature), Mathematics (arithmetic including logarithms and stocks and-shares, algebra, geometry and trigonometry), a foreign language (at my school only French was on offer), a science, and at least one, of either history, geography or another science (general physics, chemistry, biology and, I think, a more advanced physics, were on offer). To obtain matric. exemption you had to achieve ‘credit’ level in all of those five subjects.
It will be obvious that many pupils who took the exam failed in just one or two subjects and left school without any kind of certificate. It would be absurd though to claim that, because of that, they were less well-educated than someone who left school last year with a couple of mediocre GCSEs.
I sat the exam in English, Maths, French, history, geography and ‘general physics’ (guaranteed to be about principles only, with no mathematical questions!) and passed with Matric Exemption, though only because the examiners were allowed a little latitude. They considered that my ‘Distinction’ in English outweighed my ‘lower than Credit standard’ in French! I didn’t, of course, go to London University. In 1937 that wasn’t really an option for working class pupils, but the Matric did help me to get a better job!
Oh yes, along the way to eighty-eighty I have picked up two or three other professional qualifications, including a certificate qualifying me to teach in one of those adult educational colleges so warmly recommended to us poor ignorant old pensioners by the Clacton Gazette!
Visitor numbers during those three successive spring public holidays suggest that many may be on the way, and that we may have more than the usual number of overseas visitors taking advantage of the weakness of the pound. Despite all the criticism in the correspondence columns of the Clacton Gazette, I believe that most visitors will be attracted by our town’s newly laid-out centre and will be encouraged to come again. I have been telling my German friends (who live nearly 700 miles from their nearest seaside beach!) about the Essex holiday coast’s low rainfall, welcoming piers, colourful public gardens, and miles of tide-washed sandy beaches, not to mention the proximity of historic Colchester and the lovely Stour Valley; just as I tell my English friends about the mountains and lakes, the hotels and pubs, the ancient towns and villages and the low prices, of the three-country-corner land where the frontiers (which happily no longer exist!) of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic come together.
‘Some corner of a foreign field…….’
Nowadays, the bodies of soldiers killed in action are brought home for burial and thus do not become, as claimed in Rupert Brooke’s poem 'The Soldier', ‘some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England’. Plenty of British blood has watered Afghan furrows though, from our two disastrous adventures there in the 19th century. It has, no doubt, mingled with the Russian blood that was shed there just a few short years before our own latest campaign began.
I am writing these words on Tuesday 14th July, the day that eight bodies were flown home together, after one of the worst weeks for the British army since the Falklands War. I sometimes wonder how many British and American, not to mention Russian and Afghan, lives might have been spared had our politicians refrained from encouraging and giving covert support to those to whom we then referred as ‘the gallant Mojihadin’ but who are now the fanatical insurgents exacting a bloody daily toll from among our young soldiers. It is quite possible that British or American agents taught them how to make those simple roadside bombs currently causing so much death and destruction.
Can the present war be won? Top British and American politicians insist that it must be – but then I have little doubt that British politicians said much the same thing in 1850 and 1882, and that the same claim was made in Moscow just a few years ago. Events proved otherwise then and I very much fear that they will do the same this time….after even more lives have been lost.
I have no doubt that NATO Forces (what on earth has Afghanistan to do with the North Atlantic?) can subdue the Taliban and its allies, possibly even succeeding in eliminating all their strongholds and hiding places. But ideas (even thoroughly bad ones!) can’t be destroyed by force. I don’t believe that we can establish an Afghan government with either the inclination or the strength to eliminate in Afghanistan the pernicious doctrines of the Taliban – opposition to democracy and to freedom of speech and religion; opposition to girls receiving any education beyond religious instruction, and relegation of women to the status of personal property; slavish adherence to the most intolerant and restrictive interpretation of the Islamic Faith – the equivalent of that of the Christian iconoclasts, witch-hunters and heretic-burners of past centuries.
Opinion polls suggest that almost half of British people feel that we should pull our forces out of Afghanistan. My own instinctive feeling is the same, but I realize that that too could have disastrous consequences. After the Soviet withdrawal (‘Afghanistan is free again!’, our newspapers and politicians proclaimed) there was a not-widely-publicised bloodbath in Kabul and other Afghan cities. Those who had co-operated with the Soviet-approved regime were hunted down and slaughtered and Afghan women and girls (who had enjoyed more freedom under the Soviets than they had ever before known!) were again reduced to the status of chattels and house slaves.
Does anyone imagine that the situation would be any different if we were to withdraw our troops? Red, and Red-White-and-Blue flags look remarkably similar to Taliban zealots. They believe that both are flown by Godless infidels intent on attacking their religion and destroying their centuries old customs and culture. The conviction that God is on their side can inspire men and women to great heights of heroism – but it can also license deeds of almost unbelievable cruelty and inhumanity.
We cannot with clear consciences withdraw our forces from Afghanistan before we have found a way protecting, or evacuating, those Afghans who have embraced the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government towards which we have urged them.
We ‘ignorant pensioners’?
Is the ‘Tendring Pensioner’ destined to replace the ‘Essex girl’ as an iconic symbol of human ignorance? It seems that the Tendring District is an area of ‘low educational achievement’ with 22 percent (about 9,500 people) having no qualifications, compared with a mere 12.5 percent across the East of England.
It’s OK though. It isn’t the up-and-coming young and middle-aged who’re ignorant. The survey has been ‘skewed’ by the large number of over-65s living in the district and, of course, they didn’t have the educational advantages that the young enjoy today! The Clacton Gazette tries, in its understanding-the-elderly way, to be helpful. ‘It is never too late for learning’ announces its ‘Comment’ column. It assures us that, ‘for those that do commit to learning later in life, they are much the richer for it and education is one of the few things in the world which, if it were universally available and availed of, can be seen as a panacea for most of the ills that infect us at home or abroad. If, at eighty-eight, I wanted to express such patronising rubbish I would certainly manage to do so rather more succinctly and literately than that!
Doesn’t it occur to whoever conducted the survey, and to those who pontificate in the columns of the press, that lack of ‘paper qualifications’ could simply mean that education authorities of fifty, sixty or (in my case) over seventy years ago didn’t distribute these qualifications quite as freely as they do today?
+1930s.jpg)
A class of nine-year old boys at Springfield Council School, Kitchener Road, Ipswich in 1930. I am the anxious looking little boy with glasses sitting just by the knee of the Headmaster (A Mr Offord , ‘old Pip Offord’ to us kids – behind his back, of course). I was admitted to the Northgate Grammar School a year later.
In the 1930s I was one of a minority who attended a secondary school and stayed on at school until I was sixteen. The vast majority of my contemporaries received only a primary (we called it an elementary) education and left school at 14. For them there was no ‘school leaving certificate’ but that did not mean that they were totally ignorant. Very few boys and girls in those days left school at 14 unable to read, write and do as much arithmetic as they were likely to need in later life. They also had a sketchy idea of Britain’s history and of the geography of the world, and at least some acquaintance with English classical poetry and prose including, of course, the Bible. Today’s sixteen-year-old school leavers who knew as much would certainly get some kind of a certificate.
At my secondary school we studied for the London University ‘General Schools Certificate’ which, for those who obtained high enough marks, conferred exemption from the Matriculation (minimum entrance requirement) of London University. For that reason the exam was often known simply as ‘the Matric’. To obtain the certificate we had to study and reach the pass standard in at least five subjects including English (language and literature), Mathematics (arithmetic including logarithms and stocks and-shares, algebra, geometry and trigonometry), a foreign language (at my school only French was on offer), a science, and at least one, of either history, geography or another science (general physics, chemistry, biology and, I think, a more advanced physics, were on offer). To obtain matric. exemption you had to achieve ‘credit’ level in all of those five subjects.
It will be obvious that many pupils who took the exam failed in just one or two subjects and left school without any kind of certificate. It would be absurd though to claim that, because of that, they were less well-educated than someone who left school last year with a couple of mediocre GCSEs.
I sat the exam in English, Maths, French, history, geography and ‘general physics’ (guaranteed to be about principles only, with no mathematical questions!) and passed with Matric Exemption, though only because the examiners were allowed a little latitude. They considered that my ‘Distinction’ in English outweighed my ‘lower than Credit standard’ in French! I didn’t, of course, go to London University. In 1937 that wasn’t really an option for working class pupils, but the Matric did help me to get a better job!
Oh yes, along the way to eighty-eighty I have picked up two or three other professional qualifications, including a certificate qualifying me to teach in one of those adult educational colleges so warmly recommended to us poor ignorant old pensioners by the Clacton Gazette!
Swine ‘Flu
Swine ‘Flu is in the news again. It is spreading rapidly…..and there have been some deaths. These are obviously a tragedy for the relatives and friends of the victims. For most people though, Swine ‘Flu remains a mild affliction, less serious than the ‘seasonal ‘flu’ that occurs every winter and which also always claims some deaths.
Generally with epidemics it is the very young and the very old who are most at risk. This time, although the very young are in danger the very old, like me, appear to be immune. This is, I suppose, most likely to be for the rather boring reason that we have already encountered and beaten off every possible mutation of the ‘flu virus.
I prefer to think though that on this, Charles Darwin’s anniversary year, we are being given a demonstration that ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a universal rule. We oldies, with no possible evolutionary justification for our continued existence, manage to resist swine ‘flu better than our still-young, active and virile contemporaries!
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